good afternoon how are we doing I've watched some of the sessions that you've
been through and they've been fantastic we're gonna jump into something a little bit different which is gonna be on negotiations before I dive into it I
just want to give you about a 30 second to 1 minute introduction on Who I am and where I'm coming from because I think it's sometimes useful to know who you're
gonna be dealing with for the next half hour or 40 minutes as mentioned my name is Deepak Malhotra I'm at the Harvard Business School I've been on the faculty
there for about 15 years I got there in 2002 and my area of work is negotiations negotiation deal making disputes conflict diplomacy anything in
that area is things that I find interesting now being out of business school most of my work is in the world of business and most of the stuff I do
outside of Harvard Business School is working with companies often early-stage companies or entrepreneurs thinking about how to help them consult with them
advise them on difficult deals strategic partnerships issues they face and scaling or other kinds of strategic problems but while I work a lot with
businesses I also do some work in some other areas I work with some governments thinking about how to help resolve armed conflicts ethno-political conflicts
they're dealing with insurgencies or a peace process I do some work with hospitals and doctors so they can think more carefully about how they might have
effective conversations with their patients so that the patients can make better health decisions and the reason I mentioned that the work outside of the
business area in the world of conflict in the world of medicine etc the reason I mentioned that is because it's gone a long way in shaping my own view about
what negotiation is and what negotiation is not and I like to lay out my perspective at the very beginning before I dive into specifics having negotiated
and worked on negotiations and consulted within studied negotiations in different industries also in different domains like conflict and healthcare one of the
things I've come to appreciate is that at the end of the day negotiation is not about dollars and cents and it's not about deal terms and it's not about
emotions and it's not about lives lost or lives saved it's not about ceasefires at the end of the day negotiation no matter where
you're negotiating what the substance of the negotiation is how many people you're dealing with negotiation is always fundamentally about human
interact and the question we are always trying to answer the problem we're always trying to solve as negotiators is how do we
engage with other people in such a way as to achieve better understandings and better agreements that's it doesn't matter what we're negotiating
through which medium we're negotiating what the stakes are how complex it is what we're always doing as negotiators is trying to figure out how do we engage
with other people in such a way as to achieve better understandings and better agreements and what I'm gonna try to do over the next 30 minutes or 40 minutes
is talk about some of the things that you might do perhaps differently than you've been doing to make it more likely that you achieve success in that
endeavor as you're dealing with other human beings now I spend all my time thinking about negotiations and I'm pretty sure you don't spend all of your
days thinking about negotiations but most of you would probably admit that many of the interactions you have in your work but also outside of the
professional sphere have a negotiation element to them anytime you're dealing with someone who has a different perspective than you do anytime you're
dealing with someone who has different interests than you do a negotiation lens can be useful and so we're going to be talking about now is some of the ways in
which you can make sure that when you're negotiating when you find yourself in a situation where you're doing a deal or you're in a dispute or some kind of
conflict you might be able to navigate it a little bit better and the way we're gonna do it is what we call the session is negotiation tweaks and the
inspiration for that term comes from golf I don't golf very much but whenever I tell someone I like golfing and I would
like to be better at golf often what they will tell me is it's a really good
idea to go to a coach to a professional to get at least one lesson and I'll say well what's one lesson gonna do and they're gonna say well it's not gonna
make you a great golfer but immediately they're gonna look at how you golf and they're gonna be able to give you a few tweaks they'll see the way you grip you
know the golf club they'll look at your swing they'll look at what you're bending your arm or not they'll look at how your feet are position and they'll
be able to pick up a couple of things that you can do that are quick fixes easy tweaks that you can make that will have downstream consequences to make you
more effective at golf I haven't done that but I like the idea and so I'm
going to do the same thing in this world of negotiation in the 40 minutes I have and now of course less than 40 min I'm gonna try to go through 22 things
you might consider doing in your negotiations some of these things maybe you're already doing some of these things might be the opposite of what
you've been doing some of these things might be something you never thought about before and my hope is that everybody who is listening to this
either in the audience live here or online will be able to find at least one or two or three things that you look at and you say oh that's interesting I