It’s back to school at the Freeman School. Graduate classes started this Monday, but I’ve been on campus since last week. About 30 of us took a special intensive negotiations course that lasted all day for five days.
Most of the class periods began with a short lecture, then we were broken off into partners and told to negotiate cases. The cases ranged from the sale of a gas station to the construction of an offshore mega-port. In all of these exercises, we were given secret notes on each sides’ priorities. After a certain amount of time, we either had a deal – or we didn’t.
It was very interesting to see the range of deals struck. In some cases, both parties walked away with a fair deal. In other cases, the deals were very lopsided. Walking away from that class, I definitely will be looking at employment negotiations differently.