Introducing this blog and site: "Insights from Jim Sebenius about complex negotiations &c."

Welcome to my site and blog! In this introductory post, I underscore my main goal: that each and every time you read something I’ve written here, you find it valuable for dealing with challenging negotiations. To give you a sense of what informs my approach, I also briefly describe my background, career, and a number of my recent activities that involve dealmaking and dispute resolution in private and public contexts, both in the United States and globally.

How a "virtual lockout" or "virtual strike" can save baseball--and other labor disputants--from themselves

David Lax and I present a novel idea—a “virtual lockout” or “virtual strike”— that lets owners and players battle it out financially to their hearts’ content—but that keeps the games going, fans in their seats, and the sport undamaged. We recently described this concept in a cover story in the Boston Globe’s Sunday “Ideas” section. Given a lot of intrigued reactions, including from labor relations experts and those with a large direct stake in the issue, we think you might enjoy checking out the Globe version here or in this blog post with a lightly edited version (to see it, click on the headline or picture above).

This seemingly “impossible” concept—a full-throated labor-management fight while the games go on—applies beyond sports. To illustrate how it could work, we use a 2021-22 case in which Major League Baseball owners “locked out” the players in an action that could lead to games or even the entire season being canceled.

Practical Insights from the Great Negotiators: Zoom Out/Zoom In*

Apart from my academic research and advisory work helping companies with their toughest negotiations, I seek to distill practical lessons by carefully studying many of the world’s greatest negotiators. In this blog, I briefly describe how I study these remarkable men and women and highlight one cross-cutting insight from this work: how remarkable negotiators make a practice of going back and forth between “zooming out” to a broader strategy and zooming in to the specific individual with whom they are negotiating. These dual perspectives—strategic and interpersonal—provide complementary insights and tactical guidance. This post illustrates how this valuable practice can be useful in private as well as public negotiations.

Amazon’s New York Fiasco: Seven Lessons for Dealing with Complex Negotiations

Amazon is known for innovation but in deciding on—and ultimately backing out of—a decision to site its new headquarters in Queens, the company fell into a common trap. In my experience advising companies and governments, versions of this—avoidable—outcome are shockingly prevalent.  So I wrote a longer version of this post as part of Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series. In short, how the DAD (Decide-Announce-Defend) approach to negotiation can become DADA (Decide-Announce-Defend-Abandon)—and what to do about it.

Why Read "Kissinger the Negotiator"?

Complex and controversial, Henry Kissinger’s name inevitably comes up as a remarkable negotiator. For example, Walter Isaacson, Kissinger’s often-critical biographer, called him the “foremost American negotiator” of his time. This book, which I co-authored with Nick Burns and Bob Mnookin, delves into Kissinger’s approach to negotiation, a surprisingly neglected aspect of his record. Our primary goal is to unearth the implications of Kissinger’s strategies and tactics for today’s most challenging business and diplomatic negotiations. This post sketches the origin of this book along with assessments by formidable current negotiators in business, finance, law, diplomacy, and tech about the practical value of the book’s advice. There are also FAQs pointing to answers about the relevance of Kissinger’s approach beyond 1970s diplomacy, ethical issues raised, etc., as well as audio and video resources.

Negotiating Past an Impasse Over “The Wall”

To get past the impasse in the second round of shutdown talks, two negotiation concepts point the way. First, intractable, single-issue, win-lose negotiations can often be resolved by heeding the wise words of Dwight Eisenhower: “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” Second, craft an outcome that permits each side to give a (genuine but differently spun) “victory speech” to its constituents.