Insights
Negotiating with Vladimir Putin: Video Advice from Five Former U.S. Secretaries of State
By JIM SEBENIUS – The horrific Ukraine war will almost certainly lead to negotiations with Vladimir Putin. To prepare to deal successfully with this challenging counterpart, we have excerpted advice from interviews with five former U.S. Secretaries of State who have negotiated extensively with Putin.
Saving Baseball From Itself: A Virtual Lockout
By DAVID LAX – Jim Sebenius 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 it in a cover story in the Boston Globe’s Sunday “Ideas” section.
Dealmaking Disrupted: The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation
By BEN COOK – We’re pleased to announce that our seminal new paper – “Dealmaking Disrupted: The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation“ – has just been published in the Harvard PON Negotiation Journal. Download the PDF and take a look today!
Some Reading & Listening Suggestions for Negotiation Aficionados in 2021
By JIM SEBENIUS – As we look forward to a brighter 2021, this message describes several books, podcasts, and audiobooks that I’ve especially valued over the last year. I hope you will enjoy a few of them.
Negotiation & Social Media: Walking an Ethical Tightrope
By PAUL LEVY – How do we balance the tremendous potential for the use of social media in negotiation with the ethical concerns that can arise from such use?
How Social Media Can Kill or Enhance Your Deals
By BEN COOK – The disruptive effects of social media have been felt around the world, as digital technologies introduce new capabilities and dynamics that touch business, diplomacy, and politics. Yet neither scholars nor experienced practitioners have a good handle on how to use of social media most effectively and ethically as part of negotiation strategy and tactics. In effort to address this surprising gap, we recently explored a series of case studies in how social media can kill, enhance, derail or save your most important deals.
NEW RULES, Pt. III: Enhanced Party & Interest Mapping via Social Media
By BEN COOK – As we continue building on our groundbreaking 3D Negotiation™ approach, we at Lax Sebenius have been working to incorporate powerful new analytic tools and methodologies that mine public, open-source data from social media in order to help improve deal outcomes at every level.
(WEBINAR RECORDING)
NEW RULES, Pt. II: How Proactively Embracing Social Media Can Strengthen Your Hand
By ISAAC SILBERBERG – Recently, we’ve been expanding on our own Paul Levy’s prescient and strategic use of social media to mobilize supporters and neutralize opponents to block a dangerous negotiation by proactively inoculate stakeholders and fend off a multimillion-dollar unionization drive.
(WEBINAR RECORDING)
NEW RULES, Pt. I: The Perils & Potential of Social Media in Public Negotiations
By BEN COOK – At Lax Sebenius LLC, we’ve been building on our groundbreaking 3D Negotiation™ approach to incorporate a deep understanding of social media network structures, native digital fluency and rigorous data analytics that can help improve deal outcomes at every level.
(WEBINAR RECORDING)
A 3-Minute “Goat” Negotiation Challenge (with Real Implications)
By JIM SEBENIUS – I first heard this brief negotiation story from my friend and colleague, William Ury, though it turns out to have variants in many cultures. The lessons of this tale have been invaluable to me in advising on truly challenging business and political negotiations.
A 3-Minute Dealmaking Challenge from Teddy Roosevelt
By JIM SEBENIUS – I have a puzzler: you’ve printed up 3 million brochures with copyrighted photos for which you didn’t get permission. If you don’t use the photos, you’ll lose the election; if you do, you could be out $3 million that you don’t have. Advice for negotiating with the greedy copyright holder?
Rupert Murdoch, the NFL, and the Negotiation That Remade TV
By JIM SEBENIUS – Scarcely 25 years ago, Fox languished as a second-tier network. How could a mostly Australian team, with no experience in American football, persuade the NFL to abandon CBS and risk putting its crown jewels on Fox’s “small, rickety network?”