subtle discrimination against certain groups, such as

parents who seek to be home after school with their children.

If a company respects its employees desire for flexibility
and balance, executives must seek new ways to indicate,
both in employment negotiations and on the job, that they
value all workers contributions equally.
In their book Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You
Negotiate (Viking, 2005), which I overviewed in our January
2006 issue (Leveraging Emotion in Negotiation, Reprint
# N0601C), Harvard Law Schools Program on Negotiation
scholars Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro identify core
emotional concerns to address in negotiations with
employees and colleagues. Negotiators can elicit positive
emotions from their counterparts by building affiliation,
expressing appreciation, respecting the other sides

autonomy, acknowledging status, and finding a role for

each side to play.
It pays to identify these core concerns in your internal
negotiationsconcerns that can vary by microculture.
Your marketing manager may take special pride in having
led a softball team to a state championship, and a communications officer may be seeking to adopt a child. Being
able to talk openly about affiliations will allow people to be
their fully rounded selves. This could motivate them to
give you their best effortand their best offer.
Susan Hackley is managing director of the Program on Negotiation at
Harvard Law School and publisher of Negotiation. She was formerly a
political and communications professional and cofounder of an
Internet company. She can be reached at negotiation@law.harvard.edu.

THE MIND OF THE NEGOTIATOR

Negotiate Like a Diplomat

Those who travel regularly across cultures learn to broaden their focus.
Take a lesson from the diplomatic experts and become a better bargainer.
BY MAX H. BAZERMAN

to join a team in developing and teaching a course on corporate diplomacy for the
most senior executives of one of the 20 largest firms in the
world. Much of the course focused on decision making and
negotiation in untraditional business environments. By
nature of its manufacturing business, this firm often creates long-term contracts and makes significant investments in nations that are in flux and where business
relations do not always follow the expectations of moredeveloped economies. For these reasons, the firms leaders
cared deeply about creating the very best corporate diplomacy training possible.
In our course, we presented a negotiation case set in an
Eastern European country undergoing significant political
and economic transition where many of the executive students had negotiated or would negotiate in the future. The
case was based on a recent episode involving executives
from the firm. (Details have been changed here.) With help
from local partners, the firm had bought property in the
host country and set up a call center to handle North
American customer service. Taking advantage of legal
loopholes and government corruption, the local partners
stole the firms property, costing the multinational hundreds of millions of dollars.
RECENTLY HAD THE OPPORTUNITY

Too often, negotiators consider only the information

that is most obvious about the negotiationspecific
information relevant to the bargaining task at hand.
Meanwhile, critical information lies outside their awareness. In this case, the firms executives failed to search for
and consider readily available information in the broader
environment, including information about government
corruption and real-estate regulations, relevant to the
negotiation. Here, I will explain how the experiences of
diplomatspeople trained to see the big picturecan
broaden your focus and make you a better negotiator.

Bounded awareness and negotiation

New York University professor Dolly Chugh and I refer to
the common and systematic failure to see readily available
and important information as bounded awareness. The
diagram on the next page represents how an overly narrow
focus can limit negotiators.
Ineffective negotiators remain locked in the inner circle,
focused on the details at hand. Effective negotiators include
broader circles of information in their field of vision. As a
result, they more fully understand the implications of their
actions and expand their awareness of the negotiation.

July 2006

Negotiate Like a Diplomat (continued)

FOCUSING FAILURES

that would serve all negotiators well. Its particularly

important when the rules of a negotiation are foreign and
unfamiliar.

The role of culture

Information
in focus
Information
out of focus

The lessons of diplomacy

Lets return to my experience team-teaching the corporations executive negotiation course. In addition to the faculty
and students, the sessions were attended by very high level
former diplomats who had worked in the country where
the case had occurred. We invited the diplomats to provide
insight into local customs, changing politics, and business
norms. They provided that knowledgeand much more.
They taught us, faculty and executives alike, to think more
broadly about information that is not obviously relevant to
a given negotiation but is crucial nonetheless.
Here are some of the important questions that the
diplomats posed:
How will different owners of a potential partner
firm in the foreign country react to the interests
of a multinational?
How will changing local laws affect the wisdom of
the transaction?
What opportunities for learning are you creating?
The host of questions continuedquestions that were
novel to the executives and the faculty. It became clear that
the executives involved in the actual case had not asked the
questions the diplomats identified; if they had done so, the
corporations business-development activities would have
been more successful.
What did the diplomats bring to the discussion? A more
inclusive mindset. Their questions broadened our awareness beyond the scope of the teaching plan in very interesting
and productive ways.
Clearly, the diplomats had a trained ability to think
about the big picture of a given negotiation. They asked
questions that did not occur to very high level and successful business executives or business school professors. This
tendency to think in broader concentric circles is a skill
10

Negotiation

How do diplomats develop their ability to think broadly

about negotiations? In their research, William Maddux
and Adam Galinsky of Northwesterns Kellogg School of
Management and Gillian Ku of London Business School
found that people who have lived abroad are more capable
than others of seeing a counterparts point of view and
therefore thinking more broadly about a negotiation. (See
their article The View from the Other Side of the Table in
our March issue, Reprint # N0603A.)
Thus, exposure to different cultures and perspectives
the kind that diplomats acquire on the jobmay help you
develop the ability to expand your focus in negotiation.
This finding is consistent with the work of Carmit Tadmor
and Philip E. Tetlock of the University of California at
Berkeley, which shows that people with bicultural backgrounds think in more complex ways, on average, than do
individuals from a single cultural background.
For most of us, living in a foreign country to broaden
our perspective on negotiation is not a feasible option,
however appealing. But we can learn to think more broadly
and to overcome the assumption that our own norms will
govern the behavior of people living in very different
cultures.

How to broaden your focus

The more important and complex your talks are, the
greater the need to seek information from the outer circles
of your awareness. In addition, the more unusual the negotiation is and the less you understand about the other
party, the more you should strive to broaden your focus.
What type of information might you be most likely to
miss? To answer this question, reconsider your most
important past negotiation. In retrospect, did you ignore
any important information or miss any key opportunities?
Was it possible for you to obtain the missing information?
How would you have found it? Your answers may provide
hints on where to find the most important information in
the broader concentric circles of your negotiations.
In our corporate course, the diplomats enhanced our
understanding of the negotiation at hand by asking and
answering lots of questions that hadnt occurred to any of
usnot those who had brokered the deal, not the other
executive students, and not the teachers. I present six of
their questions here and explain why it might be useful for
you to pose similar questions when preparing for and
conducting your most important negotiations.

1. How will various individual owners of a potential

partner firm react to the interests of a multinational?
Extensive research has shown that people tend to treat
unfamiliar groups more stereotypically than they treat
their own group. The result? When we negotiate with people
we dont know well, were likely to fall back on stereotypes.
As a result, we miss the unique views represented by the
unique individuals on the other sideand miss key
insights as well. Negotiators often act as if another company
or another culture speaks with one unified voice. In fact,
different people within an organization inevitably will
have different opinions about the negotiation.

player. Its all too likely that the two companies involved in
the merger failed to consider how their closest competitors
might react to this industry shift. Specifically, their merger
might lead the largest and third-largest players to merge as
well, creating a net loss of competitiveness. Given the complexity of deal making in developing and rapidly changing
economies, the tendency to ignore the role and power of
your competitors grows exponentially. Wise executives
broaden their focus beyond the negotiating table.

5. What precedent are you creating for future deals?

Negotiators are likely to find that the first deal they

create in a developing or rapidly changing economy is the
2. How will changing local laws affect the wisdom of the
most difficult one. Due to the intense concentration
transaction?
required, its easy to become absorbed in the current deal
Citizens of developed, relatively stable countries such as
and lose focus on future deals. Yet the first deal can very
the United States tend to view laws as
easily create precedents for future
fixed. But in developing and rapidly
deals that will affect your company
changing countries, politics can The more important and complex for decades. Developing and attenddramatically change the value of a
ing to a long-term perspective are
your
talks
are,
the
greater
the
negotiated deal. These changes are
difficult yet critical tasks in these
particularly pronounced as coun- need to seek information from the contexts.
tries become democracies or pseuouter circles of your awareness. 6. What opportunities for learning
dodemocracies, or change their
borders. When negotiating abroad,
are you creating?
wise executives collect information about how political
In addition to focusing too narrowly on their organizachanges could affect their partnerships before talks come
tions first deal in an unfamiliar economy, negotiators also
to an end.
ignore the potential learning opportunities created by the
experience. I am personally familiar with at least one deal
3. In a distant land, how can you gain information about
in a developing economy in which a large multinational
the key personnel of an organization with which you
lost nearly $500 million, due in part to the focusing failures
might pursue a joint venture?
described in this article. Fortunately, that first deal opened
In any negotiation, its important that you attempt to
up the opportunity to craft a second deal that is now worth
understand the interests and goals of those on the other
tens of billions of dollars.
side of the table. When youre negotiating in a foreign
In this article, Ive focused on negotiations that take
country with a volatile economy, the backgrounds of key
place in distant countries. But the lessons of diplomacy are
actors have more potential to vary and to critically affect
just as relevant when youre negotiating in different
your partnerships. In the United States and other develregions or cultures within your own country. It pays to
oped economies, your counterparts typically will have
look beyond the cultural stereotypes perpetuated in many
transparent business careers. In developing economies, the
negotiation texts. By broadening your focus in negotiation,
other parties may have positive or negative ties to the govyou will learn to recognize and respond to differences
ernment in powerties that your organization may want
between cultures and within them. Above all, seek out the
to capitalize on or avoid.
best of both worlds, focusing intently when necessary while
remaining open to important information from the
4. How will the partner firms competitors react to a
periphery.

potential joint venture?

Within our own economy, we tend to overlook how our
negotiated outcomes will affect the next move or moves of
competitors who arent seated at the table. For example,
suppose that the second-largest player in an industry buys
the fourth-largest player to become the largest industry

Max H. Bazerman is the Jesse Isador Strauss Professor of Business

Administration at Harvard Business School and the vice chair
for research at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard. He is the
author of Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, 6th ed.
(Wiley, 2005). He can be reached at negotiation@law.harvard.edu.

July 2006

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