[FOREIGN] My name is George Siedel. I'm a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Welcome to our course on successful negotiation. In each session, I'm going to provide a course overview, so let's start with the goal of the course. We all negotiate on a daily basis. We negotiate with our friends, our spouses, our parents, our children. We negotiate when we rent an apartment, when we buy a car, when we buy a house, or when we apply for a job. Negotiation is also the key to business success. No business can survive without profitable contracts. And negotiation skills are important to your career advancement. My goal in this course is simple. I want to help you become a successful negotiator in your personal life, and also in your business transactions. A little bit about my background. I live and work in the state called Michigan. For those of your who are from outside the United States and perhaps unfamiliar with the geography. You might know where Chicago is located, right in the center of America. And Michigan is due east from Chicago. However, I was not born in Michigan. I was born south of the border in a state called Ohio. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a farm in Ohio. I finally escaped from the farm, and went to a small college down the road called the College of Wooster. I didn't even have to turn to get from the farm to the college. I'd go out the driveway, turned right on RFD 6, drove for 30 miles, and there was the College of Wooster. After graduating from college, I attended law school at the University of Michigan, and then I received a scholarship to do research at Cambridge University. After completing my research I returned to the states. I practiced law for a couple of years, and then began my teaching career. And I spent most of my career in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University of Michigan, although I have been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Stanford University, and I've gone back to Cambridge three times as a visiting fellow. During my career, I have been fortunate to have two unusual opportunities. First, I've had the opportunity to teach and lecture on negotiation in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Australia, and Africa. For example, I currently teach annual courses in Italy and Eastern Europe, and for many years I taught an annual seminar in Hong Kong. I've also had the opportunity to teach negotiation to undergraduates, MBA students, business leaders, lawyers, athletic directors, physicians, judges, and entrepreneurs. And I mention this because this course draws on my experience in two ways. First, the concepts are useful in all countries and cultures. Whether you're in Beijing, Seoul, Venice, Sydney, Mumbai, Sao Paolo, etc. And second, the strategies and skills apply to all types of negotiators. Whether you're buying your first car, or you're negotiating a major business deal. Now I should mention one other aspect of my background. It's a little bit embarrassing. And I have never disclosed this publicly. So you are the first to know. My daughter recently purchased a DNA kit for me that enabled me to trace my ancestry. And what I discovered is that part of my ancestry is based in the British Isles. That's my mother's side. Part of my ancestry is based in central Europe. The name Siedel comes from Alsace which is a part of France, and it's been kicked back and forth between France and Germany over the years. I knew that. But what I didn't discover and I didn't know until this DNA test is that I am also 3.1% Neanderthal. Now my friends and relative probably realized that all along from my behaviors. But this was the first time that I learned about this type of my background. The bad news is that your are also probably partly Neanderthal. And so as fellow Neanderthals, we have to address our Neanderthal heritage, which is based on the flight or fight response. When we are suddenly confronted with a saber-tooth tiger, we either fight the tiger, or we flee. Today, when we are confronted with a difficult negotiation, when we're confronted with a car salesman, we have the same tendency. We're fearful, we want to flee, or we fight. And one of the goals in this course is to give you the skills and strategies that us fellow Neanderthals need to overcome our common heritage. Okay. Now, let's take a look at the course Game Plan. And this is the big picture of what we'll be covering in the course. Of course, we start with this Course Overview I'm then going to give you an introduction to the University of Michigan. Now you can either watch this or skip it. If you're from outside the United States, this segment might be adventurous because it will also give you an insider's view of what a major university looks like. But if you're not interested in that segment, you can jump right to the course material, and the heart of the course focuses on the four stage negotiation process. In other words, we deal sequentially with the issues that you face in a real negotiation. So Unit One will focus on preparing for a negotiation. How do you conduct a negotiation analysis? How do you incorporate into your analysis, your BATNA, your reservation price, your stretch goal, your zone of potential agreement. Then we move on to the second unit on negotiating, and the tactics that you can use for success. In this unit, we'll look at the source of power in a negotiation, and how you can increase your power. We'll also look at psychological tools that are very effective in negotiation. These tools also represent traps when used by the other side. So we have to be prepared to avoid the traps. Then we'll look at closing the deal and creating a contract. Basically we'll look at the legal framework for negotiation. For example, you should be able to address this question. If a company makes a job offer to you, what are the legal dangers in making a counter-offer? And then finally we'll look at performance, and we'll look at especially some processes which you can use when you face difficulties with performance. So after covering that process, you'll then have a chance to practice your negotiation skills with a negotiation called The House on Elm Street. And with this negotiation, you will find a partner and you'll negotiate The House on Elm Street one-on-one with this person. This will be a test of your negotiation skills, it'll be a review of the course material. And then at the conclusion of the negotiation, you'll receive feedback from the other side. What do you do well as a negotiator? How can you improve as a negotiator? Where should you focus your future efforts in trying to improve? This feedback from the other side is one of the unique features of this course that you never obtain in real life. In real life when you finish a negotiation, the other side never sits down with you and says to you, well, you know, you did a pretty good job in this negotiation, but if you would have done this, this, and this, you could have done a lot better. So please take advantage of this ability to test your negotiation skills and obtain feedback. My former students frequently send me emails telling me about the value of this feedback. Let me give you a couple of examples. Here's one. The email says, negotiation is a fundamental skill we need to learn how to use. I was a bit hesitant to join the class because I thought I had excellent negotiation skills. However, I soon realized there was a lot to learn. The key difference was that in class I got feedback and know what I did right and wrong. While in real life I really don't know if I could have done better. Further the class gave me a scientific conceptual framework which provided a significant level of discipline into what is stereotyped as an artistic skill. And there's just one other Email, what a great learning experience. The course gave me the chance to test and evaluate myself outside the work environment. I find myself in business negotiations and discussions on a daily basis. Yet the ability to get feedback, and actually debrief a negotiation is really powerful. I considered myself rather self actualized, but some interesting things came to light. I've received of course a lot of other feedback. One piece that comes to mind was a student in a class who's actually in one of my executive classes, who headed labor relations for one of the largest companies in the world. And he liked this approach so much that when he prepared for his labor negotiations, he created what he called a huddle. Which is where his negotiating team got together, they did simulations such as the one you're going to do and then they used the same feedback mechanism. And he said they had their best negotiations ever as a result of this huddle process. Let's take a look at the course format. So here's the basic format. You're going to be watching a series of videos that last 5 to 20 minutes. These are short segments, I know you're very busy people and you can't sit down and watch, let's say a two and a half hour video in one chunk. So you can watch these short segments. You can do exercises while you watch the segments, you can do Tai Chi, yoga, but they're short and focused. They're also very interactive. I will frequently ask you questions, as I do in class, and what you might want to do when I ask you a question, hit pause, write down your answer. Think about it, of course, write down your answer, and then we'll discuss the solution. You can watch the segments weekly, which I recommend, but if necessary, you can also binge watch in the way you watch Breaking Bad, or House of Cards, or Game of Thrones. There are suggested readings for the course, however the primary learning mechanism in the course will be the videos. And actually what I suggest is doing the readings after the videos. The readings are going to summarize what is covered in the course. So you don't have to take a lot of notes in the course but recommend that you save the readings, and then that you also use the readings for future negotiations. These readings will be structured as a game plan that should be very useful to you in your future negotiations. Of course we'll have the final negotiation as part of the course format. We've already talked about that. Because this is a short course, and because you have a chance to participate in this final negotiation, I hope that each and every one of you complete the course. And at the end of the course, if you're interested, you can take an exam that will test your negotiation literacy. So that's our course overview and I, again, look forward to working with you in this course.
