My Guest
Dr. Victoria Medvec is the Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In addition to her professorship, Dr. Medvec is a co-founder and the Executive Director of the Center for Executive Women at the Kellogg School and the CEO of Medvec and Associates, a consulting firm focused on high stakes negotiations and strategic decisions. She is also the author of the best-selling book, Negotiate Without Fear, which was published in 2021.
Dr. Medvec is a renowned expert in the areas of negotiations, executive decision making, influence, and corporate governance. She teaches these topics to senior-level executives and Boards of Directors from companies around the world. In addition, she advises CEOs and their reports on critical decisions and negotiations, including mergers, acquisitions, significant customer contracts, supplier contracts, and partnership agreements. Her clients include IBM, Cisco, McKesson, General Electric, Merck, McKinsey, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, McDonalds, Bristol Myers Squibb, and J.P. Morgan Chase, to name just a few.
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Dr. Victoria Medvec on the Art and Science of High Stakes Negotiations – In The Trenches
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Questions Asked
Negotiating Best Practices
- What is the more frequent mistake: “Under-negotiating” (leaving opportunities on the table), or “over-negotiating” (not having a sense of when to take the deal)?
- What are some tactical ways that you’ve seen people either strengthen their own BATNA or weaken their opponent’s BATNA?
- What tools can we use to evaluate the strength of our opponent’s BATNA?
- What do you do when you find yourself thrust into a negotiation where you know with certainty that your BATNA is not particularly good?
- Which of following the 4 issues types represents the best place to start a negotiation: Issues that are important to both sides, issues that are unimportant to both sides, or issues that are more important to one side than the other?
- How does “reciprocity” (when you “give” something to somebody else, they subconsciously feel obligated to give you something in return) factor into your own negotiating strategy?
- Three strategies that you really advocate for are a) going first, b) leaving yourself room to concede and c) making multiple offers simultaneously. Can you tell us more about each?
- You’ve said that if you want to maintain the status quo, to highlight gains in your offer, but if you want to change the status quo in some way, then you should highlight losses in your offer. Why is that?
- Can you give us an example of a time when somebody offered something completely “outside of the box” in a negotiation in a particularly effective way?
M&A Negotiations
- Are there any particularly contentious, difficult or emotional negotiating points that seem to recur over and over again in M&A negotiations?
- In a prolonged negotiation, what signs might suggest that our counterparts are experiencing “deal fatigue”? How do we know when to wrap it up versus keep pushing?
- What are some best practices related to maintaining a positive relationship with your counterpart, even in the midst of a very complicated, intense & emotional negotiation?
- What are the primary differences across generations with respect to negotiating styles and preferences? How might our younger listeners leverage these to their benefit in future negotiations with older counterparts?
Conclusion
- When you are in a negotiation, have you ever found yourself either not taking your own advice, or noticing explicit tools/strategies/tactics that your counterpart is utilizing on you?
- Is there anything that was left unsaid in our conversation? Anything that we didn’t talk about that we should have spoken about?
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