EXECUTIVE EDUCATION

Master Negotiation: A Gain-Gain Approach to Profitable Negotiation

• Ways to test empirically your mastery of negotiation skills and to develop a plan for continuing to improve them
• Common and costly negotiator biases and how to avoid them
• The most effective first bids, counterbids and strategic anchors
• Real and imagined alternatives to settlement and how to determine if an alternative is to your advantage
• The explicit and implicit value your client associates with every outcome
• The difference between being ethical and being fair
• Real versus perceived sources of power and how to gain more power during a negotiation
• Ways to paint truthful, but strategic, pictures in the minds of other parties and to use those pictures for your benefit
• More effective ways to act and react during a negotiation
• The traits of master negotiators and how you can obtain them
• Methods for determining how you are perceived by your own team and by the members of other parties and for taking steps to ensure that your image is helping you succeed
• Tactics to shift the power balance in your favor
• Ways to deal more effectively with the most difficult negotiators
• Steps for conducting a post-negotiation debriefing session that will help you improve your next negotiation

Benefits

• Diagnose your current strategies and refine them or replace them with new, more effective strategies. No matter how skilled you are now, you’ll learn more effective skills for your next negotiation.
• Prepare to be the winner in every negotiation
• Create a plan of action, with clear objectives and a flexible set of strategies, that will help you succeed
• Separate fact from fiction and reality from perception so that you’ll have the insight you need to gain the advantage
• Be soft on people but tough on issues
• Obtain, provide and withhold the crucial information that makes the big difference in any negotiation
• Hear what has not been said
• Determine the objectives of the other parties and the bargaining zone so that you will have the understanding that leads to better results
• Avoid common errors so that you can improve your ability to negotiate rationally
• Get the best results by enhancing the other party’s perception of value and decreasing their perception of cost

Faculty

Dr. Robin L. Pinkley, Ph.D., professor of management and organizations, is the creator of the gain-gain approach to profitable negotiation and founder of the M2M Center for Profitable Negotiation. Her research—which has garnered numerous fellowships, grants and awards—focuses on the sources and consequences of negotiator power, the use of strategic anchors for enhancing opponent perceptions of negotiated value, the implication of “fair” as an outcome heuristic and the strategic application of “value context theory." Before coming to SMU, Pinkley served as visiting professor of organizational behavior at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She is a frequent speaker in management development programs and a negotiation consultant for government organizations in six countries and dozens of blue-chip corporations, including Accenture, Allstate Insurance, General Electric, JP Morgan Chase, Kodak, Lockheed Martin Vought, Macy’s, Mobil, NASA, SBC Communications, Sony Ericsson, State Farm Insurance and Yahoo! Pinkley has been featured as an expert on negotiation in a range of media, including ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, “Wall Street Journal,” “New York Times,” “Chicago Tribune,” Washington Post,” “US News and World Report,” “Money,” and “Fortune.” With Greg Northcroft, Pinkley is the author of “Get Paid What You're Worth: The Expert Negotiators Guide to Salary and Compensation.” She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles on negotiation and managerial conflict resolution, which have appeared in leading psychology and conflict management journals. Pinkley holds a doctor of philosophy degree in social psychology from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.