1. Could you briefly describe the content of the course?
This course offers a strategic and integrated perspective about how to prepare and how to deal with different types of negotiating situations in an international context. Building from simple to complex negotiations, the course develops an analytical framework that helps students to understand their negotiating situation, the tactics that are available given the situation, and the array of moves that can be employed to improve their prospects by changing the situation. It draws on the latest advances in the field of Negotiation Analysis and provides a forum for experience sharing. The course is based on the simulation Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™, developed by Professors Ingemar Dierickx and Luís Almeida Costa. Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ combines face-to-face negotiations with sophisticated information technology to create a highly realistic, intense and time-effective learning experience. As in most business situations, negotiations in The Game are embedded in ongoing relationships. A state-of-the-art computer program evaluates the deals and tracks their ramifications for future dealings. The wealth of experience gained during Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ enables students to play the negotiating game with greater confidence and superior tactical finesse.
2. What makes this course unique?
The simulation Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ provides students a unique opportunity to accumulate a wealth of experience in a realistic and time-effective way. Students engage in a broad range of face-to-face negotiations. A state-of-the-art computer model evaluates the deals and tracks their impact on all aspects of an evolving business relationship and, consequently, on the situation that students will face in later negotiations. This diverse menu of negotiating experiences tests and develop the students’ intuition. They benefit from computer-aided decision support systems and sophisticated analytical and conceptual inputs. Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ has several distinctive features:
• Evolving Business Relationship. Negotiations are embedded in an evolving business relationship. Thus, the situation each student faces will change as a consequence of the deals that he/she negotiates, the decisions that he/she and his/her counterpart take unilaterally, as well as external factors. At any moment in time, the market, the options each student faces, the constraints that he/she is facing – in fact, the entire environment – will depend on what happened before. Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ tracks the dynamics of this evolving relationship over time. Thus, as in real life, negotiators shape their own future.
• Information is Critical. Negotiations are information driven. A key feature of Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ is that the information that will be available to each student depends on his/her previous deals and decisions. In addition, students may search for information through a special tool called Neginfo™. And of course, they may learn a great deal from their counterparts as well.
• Negotiate Creative Deals. Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ challenges students to become more creative negotiators. They may “invent” variables and create their own agenda. A special procedure was developed to reconcile creativity of negotiators with the logic of computers. Thus, students will be able to explore a vast array of interesting and creative deals.
• Interpersonal Dynamics. Students’ negotiating experience will be both exciting and highly realistic. As in real life, their objectives, their perceptions and their emotions will be affected by the interpersonal dynamics within an ongoing business relationship.
• 360º Feedback. Throughout the students’ learning experience, Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ provides reliable feedback. After closing a deal, the computer provides prompt and detailed feedback about each student’s outcome. This is complemented by an in-depth analysis of key conceptual issues during the debriefing sessions. And towards the conclusion of the course students receive comprehensive “360-degree” process feedback based on observations from their colleagues.
• Personal Growth. During the course, students discover some of their real strengths as well as some of their “bad habits”. This provides a unique opportunity for personal development.
3. How did you come up with the course content/ideas?
The creation of this course was largely associated with the development of the simulation Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ by Professors Ingemar Dierickx and Luís Almeida Costa. Negotiation courses typically rely on traditional paper-based negotiation exercises. In such courses, students engage in a number of independent role-plays, which are discussed sequentially. While paper-based negotiation exercises have some important merits, they also have an important limitation: they do not capture the dynamics of repeated negotiations. This is an important limitation, as most business negotiations with clients, suppliers or other departments within the same organization are embedded in ongoing relationships. Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ was designed to overcome this limitation. In The Game, the negotiating situation each student faces depends, not only on the deals he/she negotiated before and on his/her previous decisions, but also on the relationship he/she was able to build with the counterpart. Thus, Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™ offers a unique opportunity to discuss how to deal with repeated negotiations.
4. How do this course help bridge academia and business?
In this course, students are exposed to the latest advances in the field of negotiation analysis and benefit from important tips about how to deal with cultural differences in a negotiation. Furthermore, the negotiation exercises allow students to accumulate a wealth of negotiating experience in a highly realistic environment. Thus, students face a unique opportunity to develop their negotiation capabilities. They experience that Negotiation Dynamics – The Game™, like negotiating in real life, is not only challenging but can also be great fun!
5. What do you feel makes CEMS students unique?
CEMS-MIM students are in general very smart, hard-working and highly motivated to make a difference and contribute for a better world. Furthermore, the diversity of the group in terms of nationalities, backgrounds, perspectives, etc. contributes to a very rich and challenging learning environment. That's probably why teaching in the CEMS-MIM program is always such a great pleasure!
Students said of the course:
“The course lectured by Professor Luis Almeida Costa taught us the very principles of negotiating in a setting as close to the “real business” world as it could get. The extraordinary way of backing theoretical knowledge with many illustrative examples helped us understand the topics and captured our interest. But, much more than that, participating in negotiations with our colleagues, backed by secret information material of not a few but many pages and a specifically designed software, made us feel how it is like to reach our goal in a tough negotiation setting.”
Karl-Heinz Gottschling