“The Future of Cuba, Cuban-Americans,

and the U.S. Government:
Reconciliation or War Crime Tribunals and Property Restitution?”“

with

Jorge I. Dominguez

and

Anita Snow

Date: May 4, 2010

Time: 4-6 PM

Where: CGIS Building, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs,

1737 Cambridge Street, Room N-354*, Cambridge MA

Contact Chair: Donna Hicks ([email protected]).

*Please note this event is not in the usual room.

Speaker Bios

Jorge I. Domínguez is Antonio Madero Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics, vice provost for international affairs, special advisor for international studies to the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He is the author or co-author of various books, among them “La política exterior de Cuba, 1962-2009″; “Consolidating Mexico’s Democracy: The 2006 Presidential Campaign in Comparative Perspective”; “The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict, 2nd ed.”; “Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America, 3rd ed.”; “The Construction of Democracy: Lessons from Practice and Research”; “Cuba hoy: Analizando su pasado, imaginando su futuro”; “Between Compliance and Conflict: East Asia, Latin America, and the “New” Pax Americana”; “The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century”; “Democratic Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean”; “Technopols: Freeing Politics and Markets in Latin America in the 1990s”; “To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy”; “Economic Issues and Political Conflict: U.S.-Latin American Relations”, and many articles on domestic and international politics in Latin America and the Caribbean.

A past president of the Latin American Studies Association and a past board chairman of the Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities, he currently serves on the editorial boards of “Political Science Quarterly”, “Foreign Affairs en español”, “Cuban Studies”, “Foro internacional”, and “Istor” and is a contributing editor to “Foreign Policy”. He was series editor for the Peabody Award-winning Public Broadcasting System television series “Crisis in Central America”. His current research focuses on the international relations and domestic politics of Latin American countries. For more information, visit http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jidoming

Anita Snow is a 2010 Nieman fellow and a veteran journalist who has spent most of her career working for The Associated Press in Latin America. Before coming to Cambridge last year, she was the AP’s bureau chief in Havana for a decade, single-handedly opening the office in 1999 after the news organization’s 30-year absence from the island. In Cuba, she covered stories including the custody fight over Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, who was rescued at sea off the coast of Florida after a boat wreck, and the illness and eventual resignation of leader Fidel Castro. Previously, Snow worked for the AP in Mexico and Central America for more than six years.

About the Herbert C. Kelman Seminar Series

The 2009-2010 Herbert C. Kelman Seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution series is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, as well as Boston area members of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. The theme for this year’s Kelman Seminar is “Reconciliation: Coming together after the shooting stops”.

Adapted from “When Does Gender Matter in Negotiation?” by Dina W. Pradel (vice president, Y2M), Hannah Riley Bowles (professor, Harvard Kennedy School), and Kathleen L. Mcginn (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Businesspeople often wonder whether men or women are better negotiators. According to research, gender is not a reliable predictor of negotiation performance; neither women nor men perform better or worse across all negotiations. However, certain types of negotiation can set the stage for differences in outcomes negotiated by men and by women.

When parties understand little about the limits of the bargaining range and appropriate standards for agreement, the ambiguity of a negotiation increases. In highly ambiguous negotiations, it becomes more likely that gender triggers-situational cues that prompt male-female differences in preferences, expectations, and behaviors-will influence negotiation behavior and outcomes. By contrast, in situations with low ambiguity, where negotiators understand the range of possible payoffs and agree on standards for distributing value, outcomes are less likely to reflect gender triggers. Some environments are full of triggers that encourage superior performance by women, while others are full of triggers that encourage superior performance by men. Rather than indicating innate differences between men and women, these triggers reflect stereotypes and long-standing behavioral biases.

One gender trigger that may favor women over men is playing the role of agent (advocating for others) as opposed to playing the role of principal (advocating for themselves). Research by Dina W. Pradel, Hannah Riley Bowles, and Kathleen L. McGinn, and Linda Babcock suggests that women perform better when negotiating on behalf of others than they do when negotiating for themselves; no such difference emerges among male negotiators.

The researchers asked a large group of executives to negotiate compensation for an internal candidate for a new management position. Half negotiated as the candidate; the other half negotiated as the candidate’s mentor. The negotiators were given no reference points or standards for agreement, creating a highly ambiguous negotiation. Female executives negotiating as the mentor secured compensation that was 18% higher than the compensation female executives negotiated when they were playing the candidate. Meanwhile, male executives performed consistently across both roles, at the level of female executives negotiating as the candidate.

It’s not that the female participants felt less entitled to a good salary. Prior to the negotiation, women reported salary expectations similar to those of their male counterparts. Nor were women more or less competent at the negotiation itself. Rather, it appears that the women executives were particularly energized when they felt a sense of responsibility to represent another person’s interests. Just as men excel in ambiguous, competitive environments, women are exemplary negotiators when the beneficiary is someone other than themselves.

Adapted from “Are You Overly Committed to the Deal?” First published in the Negotiation newsletter.

A telecommuter hires a carpenter to build a workstation for her home office. The carpenter’s contract requires payment of 50% upon signing, an additional 30% halfway through the job, and the final 20% upon completion. When the job is done, the woman is dismayed to find that the cabinets are misaligned. She calls the carpenter and tells him she won’t pay him the final 20% until he redoes his work. He tells her she can keep her 20%.

Sometimes, negotiating tactics and contract terms bind you to an agreement more than they would bind your counterpart. In this scenario, one party is more committed (or risks being more committed) to a deal than the other. The telecommuter is left with a shoddy office, and the carpenter moves on to his next victim.

How can you ensure that you and your counterpart are similarly committed to a deal? Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian advises you to follow these three steps:

1. Play “What if . . . ?” Before negotiating, ask yourself how difficult it would be to walk away without a deal, both psychologically and economically. Reduce the potential for escalation by cultivating your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). The telecommuter might have negotiated with several carpenters and checked their references before hiring one.

2. Assess each side’s commitment. During your negotiation (and before agreeing to a deal), assess each side’s level of commitment. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How difficult will it be for me to back out of the deal if conditions change?
• How difficult will it be for my counterpart to back out?
• What will happen to me if the other side backs out?

3. Level the playing field. Suppose your answers to these questions suggest that you would be more committed to the potential deal than your counterpart would. What should you do?

First, don’t assume the other party is trying to take advantage of you. Lopsided conditions may reflect industry convention, as with a car dealer who insists on haggling in person. Or it could be that your counterpart is simply trying to protect herself. Most home buyers wouldn’t sign a purchase contract without the possibility of walking away if they couldn’t secure a mortgage. Similarly, a carpenter might insist on upfront payments after being burned by past clients.

It’s up to you to negotiate a more balanced deal-and to be prepared to walk away if your counterpart won’t cooperate. Begin by pointing out your risk exposure to the other side. “What if I’m unhappy with the completed work?” the telecommuter might have said to the carpenter. “How can we both be protected?” If the carpenter were confident in his workmanship, he might have been willing to negotiate inspection rights before payment of the 30% installment or even deferred payment of 80% until after inspection.

A negotiator who wants to do a deal will listen to you and consider making adjustments. If someone won’t cooperate, you may need to explore alternatives to the current deal.

Adapted from “Predicting Your Response to Conflict,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Imagine an upcoming negotiation. How will you respond if your opponent seems bent on provoking an argument? If you’re like most people, you’ll have difficulty predicting your precise response. Professor Dan Gilbert of Harvard University found that when asked how a positive or negative event will affect their happiness, people accurately predict the direction of their mood but dramatically overestimate the degree of change. In other words, most of us correctly expect that a trip to Europe will make us happy, but we overestimate the degree of happiness it will bring us.

Researchers Kristina A. Diekmann of the University of Utah, Ann E. Tenbrunsel of the University of Notre Dame, and Adam D. Galinsky of Northwestern University conducted a series of studies showing that people are not very good at predicting how they will respond to conflict. When asked to imagine that they were facing a competitive opponent, participants overestimated how competitive they would be. In fact, participants actually negotiated less competitively than usual against very competitive opponents. They expected to fight fire with fire but, in fact, countered with concessions.

In one study, Julie A. Woodzicka of Washington and Lee University and Marianne LaFrance of Yale University found that women who imagined being confronted with sexual harassment tended to forecast that they would angrily confront their harasser. But actual behavior suggests that victims of sexual harassment are much more likely to respond with fear and not confront their harasser.

These differences between our expectations and behaviors are important. If we falsely believe that we would confront a harasser in the workplace, we may be less sympathetic to those who have been victimized and who fail to confront their harassers. Similarly, we may look down on colleagues who concede when confronted with tough negotiating opponents-failing to realize that we would act the same way in their shoes.

Jared R. Curhan is the Ford International Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he specializes in the psychology of negotiation and conflict resolution. He received his BA in Psychology from Harvard University and his MA and PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. A recipient of support from the National Science Foundation, Curhan has pioneered a social psychological approach to the study of “subjective value” in negotiation (i.e., social, perceptual, and emotional consequences of a negotiation). His current research uses the Subjective Value Inventory (SVI), a measure he developed, to examine precursors, processes, and long-term effects of subjective value in negotiation. Deeply committed to education at all levels, Curhan received Stanford University’s Lieberman Fellowship for excellence in teaching and university service, as well as MIT’s institute-wide teaching award presented annually by the graduate student council. Curhan is Founder and President of the Program for Young Negotiators, Inc., an organization dedicated to the promotion of negotiation training in primary and secondary schools. His book, Young Negotiators (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), is acclaimed in the fields of negotiation and education and has been translated into Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic. The book has been used to train more than 35,000 children across the United States and abroad to achieve their goals without the use of violence.

Courses Taught:

Power and Negotiation – MIT Sloan School of Management

Creating Value that Sustains Relationships – MIT Sloan School of Management

Organizational Processes – MIT Sloan School of Management

Individuals, Groups, and Organizations – MIT Sloan School of Management

Research Interests: Negotiation, conflict resolution, social psychology, organizational behavior, education.

Select Publications:

Curhan, J. R., & Overbeck, J. R. (2008). Making a positive impression in a negotiation: Gender differences in response to impression motivation. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 1, 179-193.

Curhan, J. R., & Pentland, A. (2007). Thin slices of negotiation: Predicting outcomes from conversational dynamics within the first 5 minutes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 802-811.

Curhan, J. R., Elfenbein, H. A., & Xu, H. (2006). What Do People Value When They Negotiate? Mapping the Domain of Subjective Value in Negotiation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 493-512.

Mueller, J. S., & Curhan, J. R. (2006). Emotional intelligence and counterpart mood induction in a negotiation. International Journal of Conflict Management, 17, 110-128.

Curhan, J. R., Neale, M. A., & Ross, L. (2004). Dynamic valuation: Preference changes in the context of face-to-face negotiations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 142-151.

Link to website:

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/detail.php?in_spseqno=SP000025&co_list=F

Adapted from “What About the Fine Print?” by Michael Wheeler (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

When negotiators sign on the dotted line, they sometimes worry about the wrong concerns. “Did I overpay?” wonders the buyer as he inks the sales agreement. Across the table, the seller is thinking, “I bet if I’d pushed a little harder, I would have gotten more.”

Yet it’s the words that surround the numbers that often are more important—and harder to get right. Take a simple real-estate deal. Isn’t it better to sell your condo for $400,000 than for $375,000? Not if the higher-priced deal is contingent on the purchaser’s sale of her current place. Likewise, the lowest price isn’t necessarily the best for the buyer if it doesn’t include exit provisions for a bad title or termites.

Sophisticated negotiators understand that a successful deal often hinges on hammering out the right contract language. In fact, choosing the wording is a negotiation in itself, one with its own unique pitfalls.

How do you measure success when you’re trading words, not numbers? The key is to remember that words are means to your goals, not ends. Take the noncompete clauses that employers often seek to prevent top talent from fleeing to the competition. Because most recruits don’t want to be handcuffed, hard bargaining can result. But securing noncompete language isn’t worthwhile if it’s unlikely to be enforced—and courts often disfavor such provisions.

College administrators learn this time and time again. For instance, in the summer of 2006, football coach Bobby Petrino signed a 10-year, $25 million contract extension with the University of Louisville—but took a better job six months later. Within days of his departure, Louisville found a successor by raiding the University of Tulsa; just before jumping ship, Tulsa’s coach, Steve Kragthorpe, had extended his contract through 2011.

Instead of battling over language that’s difficult or costly to enforce, look for other ways to achieve the same goal. To retain employees, for example, organizations can try one of two options: incentive clauses that vest benefits only after a certain number of years of service or “clawback” clauses that require repayment of signing bonuses in the event of early departure. A prospective employee facing such a proposal must weigh the present value of a future easy exit. The more attractive the job, the less important constraints may become.

Whenever you negotiate, be sure to calculate the tradeoff between tangible economic benefits and possible limits on your options—and ensure that compromises on one front are compensated by gains on another.

Adapted from “Is Your Lawyer Overconfident, Too?” First published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Parties in litigation are often overly optimistic about their chances of winning in court. This tendency reduces the bargaining range for settlement because one or both parties perceive their walkaway alternative (namely, letting the courts decide) to be more attractive than it actually is. According to conventional wisdom, lawyers can help their clients overcome this overoptimism bias by providing an objective assessment of a case’s merits and encourage acceptance of a deal.

Professor Oren Bar-Gill of New York University School of Law challenges this view with an evolutionary model of the settlement process between lawyers. He points out that optimistic lawyers can more credibly threaten costly litigation than pessimistic lawyers (because they actually believe the threat), thereby more successfully extracting favorable settlements on behalf of their clients.

Yet excessively optimistic lawyers will fail to settle, resulting in litigation that will, over time, expose their overoptimism (because they will lose more often than expected). In Bar-Gill’s model, optimal lawyers are “cautiously optimistic”—not excessively so or unrealistic about the odds of winning in court. Over time, all lawyers will become cautiously optimistic—or be weeded from the marketplace of attorneys.

Bar-Gill suggests that lawyers may succumb to the same overoptimism bias as their clients. The lesson: Don’t assume your lawyer is providing a completely objective assessment of the case. He may be wearing rose-colored glasses, too.

Adapted from “It’s Not Intuitive: Strategies for Negotiating More Rationally,” by Max H. Bazerman and Deepak Malhotra (professors, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

When deciding whether to start a new business, entrepreneurs should critically and comprehensively analyze negotiations over land, construction, hiring, and so on. Yet in a study by Arnold Cooper of Purdue University, Carolyn Woo of Notre Dame University, and William Dunkelberg of Temple University, more than 80% of entrepreneurs estimated their personal chances of success to be 70% or higher; one-third of them described their success as certain. In fact, the five-year survival rate for new businesses is only about 33%.

Negotiators typically are unaware of their own biases in negotiations, such as the overconfidence displayed by these entrepreneurs. At the same time, they are capable of accurately pinpointing the biases that influence others. Why? Because we make decisions using two different lenses: the insider lens and the outsider lens, according to psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and Daniel Lovallo of the Australian Graduate School of Management. A negotiator typically uses an insider lens for making judgments when deeply immersed in a particular context or situation; the insider relies on intuitive thinking. By contrast, the typical negotiator adopts an outsider lens when removed or detached from a particular situation; the outsider uses more rational thinking. The insider focuses only on the current situation, while the outsider is better at integrating information across multiple episodes—in particular, other people’s successes and failures.

Obviously, for our most important negotiations, the outsider lens is preferable. Unfortunately, however, the outsider lens is rarely the default option when we are facing major negotiations or are embroiled in conflict. A negotiator might well be aware that it takes six to 12 weeks to move from an initial sales call to a legally binding agreement. Yet, when a new prospect comes along, she may nonetheless believe that she can close the deal within three weeks. Furthermore, negotiators are likely to continue to be overly confident about their odds of success despite being proven wrong in the past. In other words, most of us fail to learn from experience.

Many intelligent people stake their reputations, large sums of money, and years of their lives on negotiations based largely on intuition and overconfidence. The strong urge to view the world—and ourselves—in a positive light can powerfully affect our decision making in negotiation. How can you make sure the outsider view is represented at your most important negotiations? First, during preparation for a key negotiation, consider hiring a true outsider, whether an expert within your firm, a consultant with unique expertise, or a trusted friend. When your deal is complex or emotionally charged, others will identify factors that you have ignored, weigh negative information more appropriately, and maintain an objective view in ways that you cannot.

If you are not willing or able to bring in an outsider, become an outsider yourself by assessing the situation as if you were not immersed in it. This strategy might require you to recall when someone else was faced with a similar situation or to collect data on what you should rationally expect. In addition, ask yourself this simple question: If someone I cared about asked me for my opinion in a negotiation such as this, what advice would I give?

The Program on Negotiation (PON) is the world’s first teaching and research center dedicated to negotiation, and its founders are among the true pioneers in the field. On April 8, 2003, seven of these founders gathered to reflect on PON’s beginnings in the early 1980s, and on their own journeys as leaders in the field that they helped to create. This 30-minute video is an edited version of their two-hour discussion.

Looking back twenty years were:

Roger D. Fisher, Williston Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and the first Chair of PON’s Steering Committee;

Bruce M. Patton, Deputy Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project and a founding partner of Vantage Partners LLC;

Howard Raiffa, Frank P. Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Managerial Economics at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government, and Director Emeritus of the Negotiation Roundtable;

Frank E. A. Sander, Bussey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Dispute Resolution Program;

James K. Sebenius, Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Havard Business School and Director of the Negotiation Roundtable;

Lawrence E. Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT, founder and President of the Consensus Building Institute, and Director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program; and

William L. Ury, independent consultant and Director of the Global Negotiation Project.

To purchase a video of a conversation with the PON founders, click here.

Adapted from “The Final Word on Small Talk,” by Guhan Subramanian (professor, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

According to conventional wisdom, small talk builds rapport and gets both sides a better deal in the end. But in fact, the question of whether to engage in small talk can be highly context-specific. New York City investment bankers, for example, tend to be far less likely than Texas oil executives to engage in small talk at the outset of a negotiation.

So, rather than adopting a blanket rule when deciding whether to engage in small talk, be responsive to the context. Consider the location of the interaction—your office, their office, or somewhere else? Because you have more control over the pace and substance when meeting on your turf, you should be more willing to use small talk to build rapport. If you’re meeting in their territory instead, look for context clues: Does your counterpart ask whether you’d like some coffee or immediately direct you to your chair? The former situation is clearly more conducive to small talk than the latter; in fact, trying to engage in small talk may irritate your counterpart in the second scenario. Also consider body language: Are you sitting together on a couch, or is your counterpart sitting at his desk with you across from him? Again, the former scenario invites small talk; the latter does not.

The substance of small talk matters as well. Suppose that you are waiting for your counterpart in her office, and the diplomas hanging on the wall tell you that you both graduated from the same small college in New England, three years apart. In fact, you dropped your son off at the same school two weeks ago. This coincidence is likely to forge a connection, even if other factors argue against small talk. Yet complimenting your counterpart on her beautiful family based on some framed photos might be a mistake if the context does not otherwise invite small talk.

One last point: Even when you skip small talk at the outset, always remain open to opportunities for making connections with the other party. Take the recent example of a diplomat who was negotiating a high-stakes treaty with representatives from another country. After more than a week of slow progress, the diplomat noted on a Wednesday that he would need to return home on Friday afternoon for an evening at the opera with his wife. Immediately, a connection was formed on two fronts: a shared dislike of opera and a shared interest in keeping spouses happy. This casual exchange altered the tone of the negotiation. The pace picked up, and the diplomat went home as scheduled on Friday afternoon—with a signed agreement in hand.

Adapted from “When You Shouldn’t Go It Alone,” by Lawrence Susskind (professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

So, you’ve decided to use an agent in your next negotiation. Now what?

It’s important not to rush headlong into the process of choosing an agent—picking the first one you speak to, for example, and sending him off to talks the next day. You need to choose your agent carefully, then establish a clear, detailed understanding of each other’s responsibilities and expectations. The following are critical steps in picking an agent and negotiating his contract.

1. Examine your potential agent’s reputation closely. When choosing an agent, put your needs first. Agents specialize in different fields and have known reputations—differences that can improve or diminish your chances of getting your desired outcomes. You might choose a particular agent because of her previous success negotiating with others in situations similar to yours. Or you might pick someone based on the strong working relationship he has with someone you know. Analyze agents’ reputations from many angles, while factoring in the particulars of your upcoming negotiation.
2. Clearly communicate your agent’s responsibilities. After you’ve chosen an agent, it’s time to write out the responsibilities you do and don’t want her to handle. Start by ranking your interests and sharing this list with your agent. A professional athlete might put “performance incentives” at the top of his list as his agent prepares to negotiate his new contract. If the player’s performance has declined recently, he might feel uncomfortable asking team owners for such upside benefits on his own. The player should also specify the degree of authority the agent does and doesn’t have at various stages in the negotiation process. The agent might have a great deal of latitude early on but need verbal authorization from the player as the deal solidifies.
   Negotiators often wonder whether they should give their agents a broad or narrow zone of agreement in which to settle. Allowing your agent to explore a broad range of alternatives makes sense, as long as she does not have the authority to make final commitments—which should always be yours to make.
3. Link agent compensation to performance. As the “principal,” you may want to include a provision in your agent’s contract that ties his compensation to the achievement of certain negotiation milestones or results. In any circumstance, it is crucial that you ensure that your agent’s interests are tightly aligned with your own. This might mean holding your agent responsible not just for the dollar value of the deal, but also for the quality of the working relationship between you and the other side in the wake of the negotiation.

In some negotiations, you may want to involve an agent just to bring fresh eyes to the situation. This may mean that an agent’s work is “front-loaded” during your own preparations or during an initial brainstorming session with the other side. Keep in mind that when it comes time to accept or reject an offer, negotiators often defer too readily to their agents. If you want your agent to disengage at some point in the process, express that caveat clearly in the contract.

Adapted from “What Makes Negotiators Happy?” First published in the Negotiation newsletter.

We all know that people have a strong need to compare their outcomes with those of others. So a negotiator’s mostly likely target of social comparison is her opponent, right?

Maybe not. Nathan Novemsky of the Yale School of Management and Maurice E. Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School conducted a series of studies examining the effect of internal social comparison (comparisons made with a negotiation counterpart) and external social comparison (comparisons with others outside one’s own negotiation) on negotiator satisfaction. Their surprising conclusion: external social comparisons affect satisfaction more than internal social comparisons.

Why? Consider that, in the real world, buyers’ and sellers’ vastly different roles make performance comparisons difficult. A purchasing agent for an HMO, for instance, cannot compare her results to those of her negotiating partner, a salesperson from a pharmaceutical firm. But she could easily compare how much she paid for a particular drug with the price obtained by another purchasing agent.

Negotiator satisfaction affects the likelihood that the other side will do business with you in the future, fully honor the contract, and act in good faith. How does social comparison on price affect negotiator satisfaction? Novemsky and Schweitzer warn that you’re unlikely to ensure customer satisfaction simply by explaining that you earned only a moderate profit from the deal. If your counterpart later finds out that his competitors paid less, he’s likely to be dissatisfied—and to avoid negotiating with you in the future.

Of course, price is the easiest basis for comparison in negotiation. Customers are far more likely to compare themselves with others on price than on a host of other important dimensions, such as timing of delivery, payment schedule, servicing of the contract, and so on. For this reason, you’d be well advised to ensure that customers won’t receive bad news when they compare prices with those outside the negotiation.

Michael Moffitt is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, where he teaches negotiation, dispute resolution, and civil procedure.  He is also the Associate Director of the Appropriate Dispute Resolution Center at the University of Oregon.  He was formerly a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he taught Negotiation, and served as the Clinical Supervisor of the Harvard Mediation Program.  He continues to teach executive education courses each year through the Harvard Negotiation Institute.  Mr. Moffitt spent several years as a consultant with Conflict Management Group, designing and delivering mediation services, negotiation coaching, and training workshops in about twenty countries.  His clients have ranged from senior judges to tribal leaders, from unionized prison guards to accountants, from railroad officials to diplomatic academy trainees.  His practical experience includes a wide range of complex public and private sector efforts. Working in conjunction with the World Health Organization, he has worked to help developing countries in Africa and Asia to improve their negotiations regarding health sector funding. He helped lead intervention and assistance programs to disputing parties in the ethnically divided Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union.  Mr. Moffitt has also provided strategic assistance and advice to corporate, non-profit, and governmental teams preparing for important negotiations, including land and water claims, labor contracts and dispute settlements.

Courses taught:

Civil Procedure (Fall), Oregon Law

Mediation (Spring), Oregon Law

Negotiation Workshop:  Creating Value in Deals & Disputes, Harvard Negotiation Institute

Research Interests: Negotiation, mediation, dispute settlement, contract negotiations, international dispute resolution

Select Publications:

The Four Ways to Assure Mediator Quality (and why none of them work), 24 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 191 (2009).

Three Things to Be Against (”Settlement” Not Included), 78 Fordham Law Review 1203 (2009).

DISPUTE RESOLUTION: EXAMPLES & EXPLANATIONS, (Aspen 2008), co-authored with Andrea Kupfer Schneider.

Customized Litigation: The Case for Making Civil Procedure Negotiable, 75 George Washington Law Review 461 (2007).

Link to website:

Michael Moffitt, Oregon Law

“Afghanistan: How to end violent conflict and promote reconciliation.“

with

Ambassador Peter Galbraith

Date: April 13, 2010

Time: 4-6 PM

Where: CGIS Building, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs,

1737 Cambridge Street, Room N-262, Cambridge MA

Contact Chair: Donna Hicks ([email protected]).

Speaker Bios

Peter W. Galbraith has served in senior positions in the US Government and the United Nations. Most recently, he was Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Afghanistan and an Assistant Secretary-General of the UN. He was recalled on October 1, 2009, after he urged the UN take more forceful action to deal with fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential elections.

From 1993 to 1998, Peter Galbraith was the first US Ambassador to Croatia where he mediated 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatia War. From 2000 to 2001, Galbraith was Director for Political, Constitutional and Electoral Affairs for the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and a Cabinet Member in the First Transitional Government of East Timor. He designed the territory’s first interim government and the process to write East Timor’s permanent constitution. He also negotiated two treaties on East Timor’s behalf with Australia that effectively quadrupled East Timor’s share of oil and gas in the Timor Sea.

Ambassador Galbraith is one of America’s foremost experts on Iraq, having been a regular visitor to the country since the early 1980s. As a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he uncovered Saddam Hussein’s murderous “al-anfal” campaign against the Iraqi Kurds, documenting chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villagers and the depopulation of rural Kurdistan. During the 1991 uprising, Galbraith was in rebel-held northern Iraq, narrowly escaping across the Tigris as Iraqi forces recaptured the area. His written and televised accounts provided early warning of the catastrophe overtaking the civilian population and contributed to the decision to create a safe haven in northern Iraq. In 1992, Galbraith brought out of northern Iraq 14 tons of captured Iraqi secret police documents detailing the atrocities against the Kurds.

Galbraith is a principal of the Windham Resources Group LLC, a Townshend, Vermont-based firm that specializes in international negotiations for government and corporate clients. His most recent books are “The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End” (2006) and “Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies” (2008).

About the Herbert C. Kelman Seminar Series

The 2009-2010 Herbert C. Kelman Seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution series is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, as well as Boston area members of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. The theme for this year’s Kelman Seminar is “Reconciliation: Coming together after the shooting stops”.

Adapted from “Driving the Deal Home,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Having trouble convincing someone to follow through on a promise? Borrow a page from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s playbook.

In September 2007, fashion designer Mark Ecko purchased Barry Bonds’ record-setting 756th home run ball in an online auction for $752,467. After buying the ball, Ecko conducted an Internet poll to determine its fate.

According to the New York Times, voters could choose from one of three options: whether Ecko should mark the ball with an asterisk, to signify the steroid allegations surrounding Bonds, and donate it to the Hall; leave it unmarked and donate it to the Hall; or shoot it to the moon. (Upon hearing about the poll, Bonds declared Ecko an “idiot.”) In accordance with the poll results, Ecko marked the ball with an asterisk and promised to donate the ball permanently to the Hall of Fame.

Despite this public promise, talks between the Hall and Ecko concerning the donation of the controversial baseball dragged on in private for months.

On July 2, 2008, the Hall publicly announced that talks with Ecko had “unfortunately reached an impasse,” according to the Associated Press. “The owner’s previous commitment to unconditionally donate the baseball has changed to a loan,” the statement continued. “As a result, the Hall will not be able to accept the baseball.” The Hall has insisted on accepting baseball artifacts as permanent donations rather than as temporary loans whenever possible.

That evening, Ecko’s personal driver delivered the baseball to the Hall in Cooperstown, N.Y., where it was accepted by spokesman Brad Horn. “We are very happy to receive the baseball as a donation and not as a loan,” said Horn.

The lesson? Sometimes intricate negotiations conducted in private can only go so far. If the other side is refusing to follow through, the best way to get that party to follow through on your agreement may be to take the dispute public. Assuming you are right, the fear of bad publicity can induce swift compliance.

Adapted from “Hands Off! Negotiating Exclusivity,” by Guhan Subramanian (professor, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Ron McAfee, a carpenter and roofing expert, spent considerable time working with a condominium association on the design of a new roof deck. After gaining agreement on the proposed layout, design, and materials, McAfee submitted a written bid of $12,500. One of the board members subsequently showed McAfee’s plans to another roofer, who offered to do the job for $10,250. The condo association voted unanimously to go with the cheaper roofer, and McAfee was left with nothing to show for his time and effort.

As this story shows, a threat often lurks in the background of negotiations between a potential buyer and seller: one or both parties might decide to shop around for a better deal. How can you protect your deal against unwanted interference from a third party? In other words, how should you negotiate exclusivity?

Exclusivity is a fluid concept in negotiation, sometimes benefiting the buyer, sometimes the seller, and sometimes both buyer and seller. Typically, the party who has the less unique asset must worry more about a “deal jumper,” or third-party interloper. McAfee’s roofing services are replaceable, for instance, but the condo association has only one roof. Accordingly, McAfee should have negotiated some form of exclusivity at the outset of his work for the association. Negotiating for exclusivity can help ward off a deal jumper and, in many cases, can mark the difference between a deal and no deal.

The clearest method for achieving exclusivity is an exclusive negotiation period, during which both sides agree not to talk to third parties, even if approached unexpectedly by others. In some arenas, these terms are called no-talk periods.

An exclusive negotiation period can facilitate deals in several ways. First, it allows both sides to signal that they believe that a zone of possible agreement, or ZOPA, exists; otherwise, they wouldn’t waste their time by agreeing to negotiate exclusively. This signal can help build the trust that parties need to explore joint gains.

Second, an exclusive negotiation period worsens both sides’ best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, since both parties are “locked out” from talking to others in the event of impasse. If neither party is making a significantly greater sacrifice of walk-away alternatives, then agreeing to an exclusive negotiation period should have little effect on relative bargaining power or the outcome of the deal.

Third, an exclusivity period sets a clear deadline for negotiations. As such, it forces one or both parties to put their best and final offer on the table before the exclusivity period runs out.

While these factors increase the likelihood of a deal, exclusive negotiating periods have their drawbacks. Exclusivity is quite valuable for the buyer with few options, but correspondingly costly to the seller who has many alternatives. As the seller in this instance, you should make sure you’ve fully exploited the benefits of nonexclusivity—negotiating with multiple parties and playing them off one another, for example—before committing to exclusive negotiations.

Adapted from “Are We in Competition?” First published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Ford vs. GM. Coke vs. Pepsi. Oxford vs. Cambridge. These famous rivalries remind us that the top two achievers in a given realm often compete fiercely with each other. Researchers Stephen M. Garcia and Richard Gonzalez of the University of Michigan and Avishalom Tor of the University of Haifa have produced a useful series of studies on when competition between entities will exist—with findings that are relevant to all negotiators.

Their main finding: the degree of competition between two rivals depends on their proximity to a standard; thus, highly ranked competitors (No. 2 versus No. 3) will be more competitive than lower-ranked competitors (No. 202 versus No. 203). In addition, rivalry increases when two groups are competing to be included in a select group. Thus, No. 500 competes with No. 501 on the Fortune 500 list more than No. 103 competes with No. 104.

Garcia and his colleagues also assessed the degree to which one party will engage in self-sacrifice to keep a competitor from gaining a larger reward. Study participants were asked to choose one of two options: (1) they and their competitor would each receive a 5% earnings boost, or (2) they would receive a 10% earnings increase and their rivals would receive 25%. Parties ranked near the top of a select group tended to choose the first option.

These studies raise the possibility that the media’s attention to rankings may be creating dysfunctional competition that hurts society overall. Could, for instance, the popularity of BusinessWeek’s ratings of business schools have the unintended consequence of reducing cooperation among schools, hurting education and research as a result?

Perhaps most disturbing, the authors find that this pattern exists even when study participants are thinking about making decisions on behalf of not-for-profit organizations. It would be unfortunate if not-for-profits with a similar mission routinely engaged in dysfunctional competition rather than working together toward a common good. The overall lesson: Negotiators need to focus on the objectives of their organization rather than simply seek to win a competition.

HERBERT C. KELMAN is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, at Harvard University and was (from 1993 to 2003) Director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Yale University in 1951. He is past president of the International Studies Association, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Interamerican Society of Psychology, and several other professional associations. He is recipient of many awards, including the Socio-Psychological Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1956), the Kurt Lewin Memorial award (1973), the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest (1981), the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (1997), and the Austrian Medal of Honor for Science and Art First Class (1998). His major publications include International Behavior: A Social-Psychological Analysis (editor; 1965), A Time to Speak: On Human Values and Social Research (1968), and Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (with V. Lee Hamilton; 1989). He has been engaged for many years in the development of interactive problem solving, an unofficial third party approach to the resolution of international and intercommunal conflicts, and in its application to the Arab-Israeli conflict, with special emphasis on its Israeli-Palestinian component.

Research Interests:

• Attitudes, Attitude Change, and Social Influence
• International Conflict and Conflict Resolution
• Nationalism and National Identity
• Ethics of Social Research
• Israeli-Palestinian Relations
• Political Violence and Human Rights

Recent Publications:

Kelman, H.C. A ‘declaration of principles’ for the Mideast. The Boston Globe, March 9, 2008, op-ed page K9.

Kelman, H.C. Preconditions in Mideast Negotiations. The Boston Globe, March 30, 2007, op-ed page A17.

Kelman, H.C. Beyond the Gaza Disengagment. The Boston Globe, August 15, 2005, op-ed page A11.

Link to website: http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/faculty/hckelman/index.htm

“The Brazilian Experience on Dispute Systems Design (DSD): the TAM and Air France cases”

with

Diego Faleck (LL.M. ‘06),

Chief of Staff of the Secretariat of Economic Law of the Ministry of Justice in Brazil

Date: April 6, 2010

Time: 12:15PM to 1:15PM

Where: Pound Hall, Room 332, Harvard Law School Campus

Click here for a campus map.

Speaker Bio

Diego Faleck (LL.M. ’06) is the Chief of Staff of the Secretariat of Economic Law of the Ministry of Justice in Brazil, President of the Federal Fund for Collective Rights and Professor of Negotiation and Mediation at the FGV/SP Law School. Mr. Faleck has been developing substantial ADR projects in Brazil, such as the design of dispute resolution systems to the TAM (2007) and Air France (2009) plane accidents and the drafting of an ADR section for the Brazilian Class Actions Bill.

The presentation will address the creation and work of the two first ever claims resolution facilities in Brazil, that took place after the crash of TAM Airlines Flight 3054 on July, 17, 2007 and of Air France Flight 447 on May, 31, 2009. The experience was based on the theoretical framework on negotiation and DSD acquired at Harvard Law School, which was used to advance the interests of the families of those who lost their lives and to avoid the enormous costs that would have been borne by the parties in resolving their claims.

Professor Bazerman’s research focuses on decision making, negotiation, and creating joint gains in society. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of sixteen books (including Negotiation Genius with Deepak Malhotra], Bantam Books, September 2007) and over 200 research articles and chapters. From 2002-2008, Max was consistently named one of the top 40 authors, speakers, and teachers of management by Executive Excellence. While at Kellogg, he was ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the Executive Masters Program of the Kellogg School. In 2003, Max received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, Max received an honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), the Kulp-Wright Book Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association for Predictable Surprises (with Michael Watkins), and the Life Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. In 2008, Max received the Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management.

Courses Taught:

Negotiation and Decision Making: Trust, Emotions, Ethics, and Morality – Harvard Business School

Decision Making and Negotiation Research Seminar – Harvard University Psychology Department

“Changing the Game,” Advanced Management Program (AMP), Program for Management Development (PMD), and Women Leading Business: Innovation and Success (WLB) – Executive Programs at Harvard Business School

Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives – PON Executive Education Seminar

Research Interests: Conflicts of Interest, Decision-making, Ethics, Negotiation, Organizational Behavior

Select Publications:

Kramer, R. M., A. E. Tenbrunsel, and M. H. Bazerman, eds. Social Decision Making: Social Dilemmas, Social Values, and Ethical Judgments. Routledge, 2009.

Bazerman, Max, ed. Quanto Sei (a)Morale?: Leadership Etica E Psicologia Della Decisione. Il Sole 24 Ore S.p.A., 2009.

Bazerman, Max, and Michael D. Watkins. Predictable Surprises. Harvard Business School Press, 2008, paperback ed.

Bazerman, Max, and D. Moore. Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. 7th ed. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2008.

Malhotra, Deepak, and M. H. Bazerman. Negotiation Genius. Bantam Books, 2007. (Winner of the 2008 International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR) Outstanding Book Award.)

Link to website:

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mbazerman/