Dealcraft: Insights from Great Negotiators

How to Think Like a Great Negotiator

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Episode notes

In the final episode of Season One of Dealcraft: Insights from the World's Great Negotiators, I’ll offer you several fresh negotiation insights plus a look back over the dealmakers and diplomats from whom we've heard during these last twelve weeks. Each of these negotiators has given us a master class in one or more of the “dimensions” that make up the “3D Negotiation” framework that David Lax and I have developed over the last three decades:


  • Setup: the moves “away from the table” designed to ensure the most  promising possible situation “at the table” for realizing your target agreement;
  • Deal design: the art and science of crafting agreements that unlock value, financial and non-financial, ideally on a sustainable basis; and,
  • Tactics: the persuasive and problem solving actions you take directly with your counterpart(s) “at the table,” whether physical or virtual.

I start this episode with insights that draw on our interviews with Colin Powell. I then loosely organize a number of actions from Season 1 into setup, deal design, and tactical groupins.  Among many other brief examples, I’ll draw on John Branca’s negotiations to buy the Beatles catalog, Des Stolar's beyond-thorough preparations for Shark Tank and dealing with Mark Cuban, Steve Schwarzman's hardball negotiations in Hong Kong, and Tommy Koh's remarkable elegant balance of spontaneity, patience, and drive that led to the U.S. Singapore Free Trade Agreement. While hardly comprehensive, I hope this look back will spur useful recollections.


Host: Jim Sebenius

Co-Producers: Alex Green and Avery Moore Kloss

Outreach: Podglomerate


Materials courtesy of the Great Negotiator Award Program at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the American Secretaries of State Program, a joint effort of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Program on the Future of Diplomacy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School. Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College.