Starting the Year with Professor McCusker

When colleagues ask where I went on vacation this past summer, I tell them I was busy learning how to be a leader, consulting a local brewery in Arnaudville, Louisiana and devising a marketing strategy for The New Orleans Opera.  My class bonded over beer and opera this summer and had little time for vacationing.  As the summer Marketing class came to an end and we presented marketing plans to the Executive Director of the New Orleans Opera, our group was quickly preparing for the jump into Management Negotiations with Professor McCusker.

After two weeks in Management Negotiations, our class seems to be learning a lot about each other and our own negotiation style. For better or worse, we have been negotiating different cases each night while learning some key concepts in the negotiation process such as BATNA (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement) and target/bottom lines.  Fortunately, we are all still friends and are learning the balance between friendly yet competitive…an important skill to learn now, in the comfort of our classroom, as students versus outside campus during an important business negotiation.  We have only three more weeks before we become expert negotiators and I am almost certain we may be able to negotiate ourselves out of a final 🙂  One thing is for sure, my workload in the office has already become less stressful as I begin to master negotiating with colleagues on sharing the workload.
Denise Woltering Vargas