Dealmaking

Deal structuring and negotiating can feel challenging in the best of situations. But when you’re dealing with “bad acts,” there are additional factors to consider when you structure your negotiation strategy. This is what one reader asked about when facing a deal to buy out a company. Here’s their question:
Q: I work for an international … Learn More About This Program

Good negotiations can easily be spoiled when the outcome is in poor taste.

After actor Kevin Spacey faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct in late 2017, director Ridley Scott and Imperative Entertainment, the company that produced and financed the film All the Money in the World, decided to edit Spacey out of the film and hire … Learn More About This Program

In negotiation, the party who makes the first offer often gets the lion’s share of the value. That can be due to the anchoring effect, or the tendency for first offers to “anchor” the bargaining that follows in its direction, even if the offer recipient thinks the offer is out of line.
Yet plenty of times, … Read When First Offers Fail In a Negotiation

Perhaps even more than in person, bargaining in good faith is essential in negotiations conducted through email. With no visual cues or body language, there can be numerous assumptions, both beneficial and otherwise, that can impact a deal between two people. Such was the case in a recent question we received regarding whether age should … Learn More About This Program

I am trying to buy a smaller company in my industry, but the negotiations have stalled over price.
It probably won’t surprise you to hear the seller thinks his company is worth a lot more than I think it is. So far we have been talking about doing a straight cash deal, but now I’m contemplating … Learn More About This Program

In the past, and even today in some settings, a handshake agreement was as good as gold. While many agreements are now concluded with signatures and legal agreements, there are still benefits of nonverbal behavior in negotiation. Shaking hands seems like such a natural way to begin a negotiation, but does it signal too much … Learn More About This Program

In the business world, companies often work so hard to outperform their direct competitors that they overlook opportunities to meet their goals through collaborative negotiation. Several negotiations in the news describe competitors forging innovative partnerships that allowed them to cooperate and compete. … Read Collaborative Negotiation with Competitors

“Confessionals.” “Informal informals.” “Indabas.” Delegates from the 196 nations participating in the U.N. Climate Change Conference, held in Paris at the end of 2015, cycled through an eclectic variety of negotiating formats in their race to make binding commitments to lower greenhouse-gas emissions. According to media reports, the participants’ willingness to shake up the complex … Learn More About This Program

When negotiators take a long-term approach to deal-making, the result is typically a win-win. Rather than simply trying to sign a contract on favorable terms, negotiators who discuss how those terms might play out over the life of the contract are more likely to set the partnership up for success. After all, when negotiators merely … Learn More About This Program

When making decisions, groups often hold a simple vote and allow the majority to get its way. But groups that instead work to reach decisions through consensus building tend to reach agreements that are more stable, more efficient, and wiser than groups that make decisions through majority rule, write Lawrence E. Susskind and Jeffrey L. … Read Consensus Building on the Court?