Location
Gleacher Center, Chicago IL
Executive Decision-Making And Negotiations
Enhance your negotiation skills, strengthen your influence, and refine your decision-making process.
Frequency
Once a year, June
Cost
$11,500 USD (accommodations are not included)
Admissions
Accepting Registrations
Acquire the frameworks to improve your negotiation skills, influence for success, and enhance your decision-making processes.
Serves as an Elective to:
Advanced Mangement Program
Drawing on the latest research in the psychology of judgment, you will learn to improve your negotiation skills, your influence, and your decision-making process. You'll learn to recognize flaws in your negotiation and decision-making processes, develop frameworks for making sound decisions, and create a system to monitor, improve, and implement your skills. You'll learn how to negotiate hard, with integrity, using the basic influence techniques of professional negotiators. You'll also acquire techniques based on the latest advancements in the field of negotiation and decision strategy that will enhance your influence with your clients, vendors, employees and/or colleagues.
By attending this program, you will:
- Practice a systematic and insightful approach to negotiations and decision-making
- Monitor and improve your negotiation skills with personalized coaching and feedback from faculty
- Evaluate your performance across situations and people
- Learn how to adapt your negotiation approach to different situations and people
- Know what information is needed to negotiate effective outcomes
Location
Chicago Booth, Gleacher Center, Chicago IL
This program is designed to benefit middle, upper middle, and senior level managers, who would like to enhance their influence—both internally in their organizations and externally with other organizations and vendors—by improving their negotiation and decision-making skills.
Managers in every functional area of responsibility, in all industry types, will benefit by attending this program. In particular, executives in areas such as marketing, sales, manufacturing, engineering, mergers and acquisitions, purchasing, human resources, strategy, and finance, as well as general managers who have been promoted through these routes, will find this program highly beneficial.
Ayelet Fishbach
Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing
Ayelet FishbachThe Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making Processes
- Framing decisions and assessing uncertainty
- Seeking information to be more informed
- Managing uncertainty to manage risk
- Recognizing and overcoming biases
Beginning with the Toughest: Price Negotiation
- Negotiating hard with integrity
- Untangling relationship building and price negotiations
- Balancing assertiveness and empathy in negotiations
Techniques for Creating Value
- Identifying tools for uncovering the interests of negotiation partner
- Moving from zero-sum positions to mutually satisfying agreements
- Quantitative preparation techniques for measuring interests and trade-offs
Influence Techniques and Problem-Solving
- Adapting common influence tactics and defenses
- Leveraging creative problem-solving as a negotiation technique
Coalitions, Power, and Fairness
- Influencing outcomes when lacking formal authority
- Strategically forming and using coalitions to build power
- Confronting issues of equity within groups and coalitions
Organizational Decision-Making
- Preparing for complex negotiations by designing a productive process and agenda
- Managing joint decision-making and obtaining buy-in from large groups
Action Planning: Putting It All into Practice
- Construct your personal negotiation strategy in one-on-one expert consultations
- Synthesize all frameworks and hard skills developed during the week in a final multiparty negotiation exercise
I have undertaken a number of professional training courses involving negotiation skills. This one is the most comprehensive in terms of pulling together theory, psychology, and practical elements allowing for conducting a well-structured and potentially more successful negotiation in a variety of situations.
—Eric Davidson, VP, Asia-Pacific-Europe-Middle East-Africa, Modular Mining Systems
I think this session really allows for creating a level of self-awareness about your own style that you might have had. The topic, material, and faculty are world-class and a great investment on my part.
—Glenn O'Brien, Managing Director, Prudential Finance
I thought I knew a fair amount about negotiation before I took the course. I have been in commercial real estate for 25 years. This course taught me a lot about my negotiating strengths and weaknesses, how to improve and how to make a lot more deals!
—Joanne Stevens, NAI Iowa Realty
Content was relevant and eye-opening to carry back to the workplace. Instruction was engaging and paced well to keep energy up while allowing for questions and interaction from the attendees.
—Brian Loudy, District Sales Manager, Rohm and Haas Company
Very good level of intensity and fast-paced live negotiations. I like the 'uncovering' lecture style so that negotiations aren't overly skewed to the 'right' answer.
—Daniel Carbery, Sr. VP Operations, Endo Pharmaceuticals
The most incredible opportunity to bring world-class learning and leadership skills back to the non-profit sector. This is an opportunity that I would never have had, to learn from some of the world’s leading thinkers, and to take home processes and resources that are not likely available to a small, arts-based, community non-profit.
—Diana Moxon, Executive Director, Columbia Art League Office
Highly practical course driving concept to application. Business cases that progressively grew in complexity and demonstrate, as best as possible, real negotiation dynamics.
—Christopher Foster, Senior Financial Analyst, IBM
Excellent program with talented instructors.
—Christoffer Gronhoj, Director, PwC
How to prepare for a negotiation
We are all negotiators. Whether buying a home or acquiring a company, we all face situations that require working with another party to set terms that we find advantageous. Chicago Booth’s George Wu explains some of the good and bad practices that can determine how a negotiation will go and looks at some of the most common negotiation problems many of us face.
(Instrumental music)
George Wu: So one question I get asked a lot is: How do you prepare for a negotiation? And I think one of the things, of course, is that you need to set aside an ample amount of time to actually negotiate. So if you leave it for the last minute, if you are preparing in the car on the way to a negotiation, that’s probably not enough time.
Now, even if you have enough time, it doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily gonna prepare well, and so one of the things, of course, I think is important is to understand a little bit about what’s gonna happen at the negotiation table, to try to simulate in your mind what that conversation is going to be like, and to prepare yourself by getting the clarity of thought about what’s going to happen in that negotiation that will enable you to do well.
And I think there’s a few things that are absolutely critical in all negotiations. The first thing that is important is that people have to understand why they’re negotiating. And one of the reasons, of course, that they are trying to negotiate is they are trying to meet some kinds of objectives that they have.
So for example, in a job negotiation, obviously one of the things that you wanna do is get a good salary, but that might not even be the most important thing. It might be one of the many¬ things that you wanna negotiate. You might also wanna negotiate what your job title is, where you’re gonna be located, what kind of responsibilities you have, what access you’re gonna have to top management, whatever.
And so all those things in principle—and lots more—could be important in a negotiation. And one of the things that everybody has to do in order to understand how to be effective and negotiate it is understand what are the things that they’re trying to achieve in a negotiation. And then, probably even more than that, try to understand the relative priorities of one thing or the other. So it’s unlikely that in a negotiation you’re gonna get everything that you want, and to the extent that there’s inevitably gonna be trade-offs between getting one thing, or getting another thing, you have to understand how much of one thing you’re willing to give up in order to get something else.
I think the second part of it is that you’re also going to follow a process where you’re trying to get in the mind of the person you’re negotiating against. So what that means is that you also have to understand why they’re at the table. So they’re at the table also to meet objectives. Some of those objectives are the same as yours, and so that is gonna be, in some sense, a zero-sum game. So if they give more money to you, then that money comes out of their pocket. If, you know . . . but on a lot of other things, that your interest and their interest actually might be compatible.
(Instrumental music) One of the things, of course, that that suggests is that what you have to do is understand what their objectives are and then understand to the extent that your objectives and their objectives match, or your objectives and their objectives conflict.
One more thing that you need to do in order to be effective in preparation is you have to understand that negotiations aren’t always successful. So to the extent that a negotiation fails, something happens. In other words, that your job as a negotiator is to do better than you would by walking away. So in negotiation parlance, we call that a BATNA. A BATNA is a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And what you have to do in every situation is understand what’ll happen if you don’t make the deal, and understand that what you’re trying to do in negotiation is do better than you would if you were walking away.
Advance Registration Benefit
When you commit your attendance by the specific expiration dates in 2025, you’ll benefit through financial savings. The savings will be automatically applied during the registration process. For more information, review our Advance Registration Benefits FAQs.
- June 23-27: $10,500 fee if registered by March 4.
Upcoming Courses
| Date | Fee | |
|---|---|---|
| June 23-27, 2025 | $11,500 | Register Now |
Speak with an Advisor
Have Questions? Contact us to discover which program is right for you and your organization.
+1 312.464.8732
exec.ed@chicagobooth.edu