For most of us, our days are filled with negotiation and conflict. They range from low stakes disputes about meeting schedules to high stakes clashes about strategic direction, and from casual debates to formal boardroom contractual agreements. Effective negotiators get the most out of disputes, not just in terms of the instrumental value they carry away, but also in terms of the relationships and reputations they leave behind. Virtually everyone could stand to improve their negotiation skills and, fortunately, virtually everyone can develop in this area.

This course aims to help students improve their skills in two fundamental ways. One is knowledge-oriented: students learn frameworks and concepts for analyzing conflict. Students acquire terms and models for identifying the type of conflict that exists in a situation and the potential costs and benefits of different strategies and tactics. Based on this, students should be able to interpret situations, plan tactics, and recognize and react to their counterpart's behavior. A second and complementary route to improving as a negotiator is practice-oriented: students complement their analytical tools with behavioral skills. Negotiation and conflict ultimately come down to behaviors - how a manager opens a potentially volatile conversation, how a mediator uncovers information, how a negotiator frames an offer or a concession. Practicing these behaviors, and understanding how other parties perceive and react to them, is essential to improving as a negotiator. The course provides continuing opportunities for hands-on practice and also provides feedback, discussion, and occasions for reflection.

Through role-play exercises, lecture, reading, and discussion, the course begins with basic dynamics in negotiation and adds complexity in stages, including multiple issues, multiple parties, mediation, agents, and coalitions. Some exercises involve numerical analyses, others revolve around qualitative conflicts. By the end of the course, students should be able to comfortably and confidently approach most any conflict or negotiation: analyzing its nature, understanding their own objectives, and plotting an approach that will give them the best shot at achieving their goals.

This course is related to a wide range of topics that are important for developing professionals. In Columbia Business School's core course sequence, it is perhaps most directly linked to the core leadership course, Lead: People, Teams, Organizations, where students will have received an overview of the topic and enacted a role-play negotiation. This course dives deeper, focusing in steps on different negotiation dynamics and ultimately addressing even more complex issues. Managerial Negotiations also deals with behavior in competitive contexts and markets, touching on topics dealt with in the Strategy Formulation and Managerial Economics core courses, and with behavior related to persuasive communication and selling, touching on topics dealt with in the Managing Marketing Programs core course.

This is a highly interactive course. It is premised on a basic assumption that understanding and appreciation of negotiations are best achieved via hands-on experiences in combination with lecture, discussion, reading, and reflection on the underlying concepts of negotiation. There will be one or more role-play exercises in nearly every class period. These exercises have been selected to help illustrate points in readings and lectures and to motivate further reflection and reading. These exercises will put you in new, and potentially uncomfortable, situations, but within the relatively safe environment of the classroom. In these exercises, you are urged to try out new and creative behaviors and tactics that have suggested themselves to you from your own reading and reflection.

Role play ground rules:

Having a constructive learning environment is essential to this course's effectiveness. Everyone plays a part in this. Here are some ground rules for our role-play exercises:

1. You are expected to be on time for class meetings and, when applicable, to arrive prepared for in-class negotiation exercises.


2. You should not show your confidential role instructions to other parties during a negotiation, nor should you directly read them aloud. At your discretion, you can choose to speak about your interests to the other side. Once the negotiation is complete, you should still keep your instructions private, unless instructed otherwise. We will debrief most of our cases collectively in class.


3. Feel free to "ad lib" in these exercises to provide rationales and explanations for your character's preferences - say things you think the character would say. That said, you should adopt the given payoff tables as reflecting your preferences. You should not make up facts that materially change the power distribution of the exercise.


4. The exercises are an opportunity to experiment. Unusual tactics (or at least ones that are different for you) add variety and can benefit the group discussion.

Because I want to encourage experimentation, I do not grade based on your negotiation outcomes. Yet I do carefully record the outcomes and, for some exercises, your answers to questions in the exercise materials. Sometimes I will show the overall patterns in this data to demonstrate points about negotiation principles. Many of the learning points in this course have been developed and refined through extensive prior classroom experiences. Just as prior students have made this course possible by sharing their experiences, you have the opportunity to contribute to the education of future students by sharing your own experiences. If you consent to allow your responses (including those from the leadership multi-rater feedback activity, negotiations exercises, and from other exercises in this course and other courses, as well as surveys by Career Services and other school offices) to be used for research purposes and for future refinement of course materials, your information will be kept strictly confidential. Any information derived from this research that would identify you would not be voluntarily released or disclosed without separate consent.

Research on students' negotiation outcomes (described in the preceding paragraph) takes place under the Columbia University IRB Protocol for "Management and negotiations research" (protocol number AAAA6074). The following individuals and/or agencies will be able to look at and copy your research records: 1) The investigator, study staff and other professionals who may be evaluating the study, 2) Authorities from Columbia University, including the Institutional Review Board ('IRB'), and 3) The United States Office of Human Research Protections ('OHRP'). The Principal Investigator for this protocol is Professor Katherine Philips ([email protected], 212-854-5621; your professor is a Co-Principal Investigator). There are no foreseeable risks to you and the proposed research does not present any additional risk beyond what you are already doing as part of the course. The benefits of the exercises are the opportunity to gain knowledge and skills in negotiating and leading effectively. Classroom debriefing aims to help you learn not only from your own experience but also from the experience of classmates. Your participation is voluntary and you may withhold your materials from research purposes at any time without an effect on your course grade. If at any time you have comments regarding the conduct of this research or questions about your rights as a research participant, you should contact the Columbia University Institutional Review Board by email at [email protected] or by phone at 212-851-7040.

If you do not want your responses and outcomes for exercises in this course used for research purposes, please notify the instructor.

Readings will be drawn from several books, and articles linked from this website.

• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (by Fisher, Ury, and Patton


• Essentials of Negotiation (by Lewicki, Barry, and Saunders)
  [NOTE: this is not the same as Lewicki, Saunders, and Barry's volume, Negotiation]
  Feel free to buy the last edition to save money!


• Difficult Conversations (Stone, Patton, and Heen)

These readings are technically optional, but students often mention they get much more out of the course if they read along with the readings. Our goal in this course is not overburden you with out of class assignments, dig deeper (by reading the readings) to the extent you wish to further your development in honing and strengthening your negotiation skills.