In this inaugural Dealcraft episode, six remarkable women and men discuss how they dealt with critical moments in their most challenging business and public sector negotiations. After each example, I’ll suggest insights that will help you handle critical moments in your toughest deals. Here’s who you’ll meet:  

• Charlene Barshefsky, elite private sector lawyer and former US special trade representative, dealing with a threatening ultimatum in China;
• Rex Tillerson, who headed ExxonMobil and served as the U.S. Secretary of State, earlier in his career facing a key moment in a middle eastern business deal, when the other side began to hurl insults and tear up two years of progress;
• Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman responding to a make-or-break negotiating impasse with a Japanese company when Blackstone was still a fragile startup;
• An English property developer facing apparently extortionate demands by the owner of the final, must-have parcel;
• How Henry Kissinger, when secretly negotiating with Zhou Enlai, finally cracked the killer issue that for years had blocked any relationship between the U.S. and China; and
• Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican diplomat and the key UN figure in the 2015 Paris climate negotiations,persuading the very reluctant Saudis to come on board.

This inaugural Dealcraft episode offers tantalizingly brief glimpses of these remarkable negotiators at critical moments. Future episodes will often analyze how these and many other dealmakers handle entire tough negotiations, not just critical moments. (Valuable scholarship on critical moments is here and here. A systematic approach to handling challenging negotiations is in the book I wrote with David Lax, 3D Negotiation.)

More about my background is here plus information about the Program on Negotiation—a consortium of Harvard, MIT, and Tufts—and the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Contact me here.

Acknowledgments: I am deeply grateful to Harvard for giving me permission to use audio excerpts from interviews I’ve conducted over the years with various Great Negotiator honorees and U.S. Secretaries of State, often with colleagues and friends such as Robert Mnookin of Harvard Law School and R. Nicholas Burns, formerly of Harvard’s Kennedy School.

More formally: “Materials courtesy of the Great Negotiator Award Program at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. © President and Fellows of Harvard College,” and “Materials courtesy of the American Secretaries of State Program, a joint effort of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Program on the Future of Diplomacy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.”

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