Professor Sebenius specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. At PON, he is a co-chair of the Great Negotiator Award Committee. In 1982, he co-founded and still directs the Negotiation Roundtable, an ongoing forum in which hundreds of negotiations have been examined to extract their most valuable lessons. Sebenius is a founder and principal of Lax Sebenius: The Negotiation Group LLC, a firm that provides negotiation advisory services to corporations and governments worldwide. In 1993, he took the lead in the Business School’s decision to make negotiation a required course in the MBA Program and to create a Negotiation Unit (department) which he headed for several years. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in business economics, a master’s degree in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford’s Engineering School, and an undergraduate degree (summa cum laude) from Vanderbilt in mathematics and English.
Research Interests: Dispute resolution, 3-D negotiation, dealing with hard bargainers, negotiating campaigns, cross-border negotiating, Great Negotiator Study Initiative, winning coalitions
Select Publications:
Sebenius, James K. “Negotiation Analysis: Between Decisions and Games.” In Advances in Decision Analysis, edited by Ward Edwards, Ralph Miles and Detlof von Winterfeldt, 469-488. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Sebenius, James K. “Facing a Protracted Dispute? Consider a ‘Virtual Strike’.” Negotiation 9, no. 9 (September 2006): 7-9.
Sebenius, James K. “Negotiation Design for Large, Multistakeholder Projects.” Negotiation 9, no. 4 (April 2006): 4-6.
Sebenius, James K. “Do a 3-D Audit of Barriers to Agreement.” Negotiation 9, no. 2 (February 2006): 7-9.
Lax, David, and James K. Sebenius. 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
Link to website:
http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facEmId=jsebenius