The following is a guest post by Jeswald Salacuse, author of Seven Secrets for Negotiating with Government, on his upcoming talk for the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
On Thursday, June 23, 2011, I’ll be teaching an all-day executive program on Negotiating Better International Deals at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the auspices of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON).
Part of the PON’s Authors Series, the program will be based two of my books The Global Negotiator (Palgrave MacMillan 2003) and Seven Secrets for Negotiating with Government (AMACOM 2008). Each participant in the program will receive both books.
The program’s aim is to enhance the skills of executives, officials, and lawyers in making and managing profitable international business relationships and in productively resolving conflicts that may arise in the course of those relationships. The course will focus on the special and, in many cases, unique challenges of conducting negotiations in the global business environment. It will be divided into three parts:
I. Making international deals, in which you will learn how to succeed at making profitable agreements with foreign partners and customers.
II. Managing international deals and relationships after they are made in ways that will advance the your interests.
III. Mending international efficiently and at minimum cost when conflicts arise in the course of your international business relationships.
Making, managing and mending international deals requires executives to overcome special barriers that they don’t ordinarily meet in domestic business transactions. This program will show you how to identify these barriers, analyze them, and develop strategies to overcome them. One challenge in particular found in every international transaction is the need to deal successfully with foreign governments. Foreign governments and agencies are often at the negotiating table in many deals. Even if they are not physically present, they almost always exert powerful influence as regulators, policy makers, monitors, and sometimes even competitors. Drawing on the research and conclusions from Seven Secrets for Negotiating with Government, the program in Cambridge will consider how best to decide on which government agencies you need to deal with, how to engage them, how to frame your proposals to achieve maximum receptivity, how to persuade government officials, and how to manage your foreign government relations once you close the deal.
I hope to see you at the program on Negotiating Better International Deals next week.
Jeswald W. Salacuse is the Henry J. Braker Professor of Law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also teaches executive training programs sponsored by the Harvard Program on Negotiation. Salacuse is the author of The Global Negotiator and Leading Leaders.
