Harvard celebrates 40 years of bargaining program

Prague/Cambridge, December 7 — The President of the Negotiators Association is heading to Harvard University this week to represent the Czech Republic in celebrating 40 years since the inception of the Program on Negotiation (PON), which began as a research project in 1983. The main point of the celebration program is a symposium on important topics of the future of the profession, which will offer several discussion sections on burning topics and negotiation trends. At the same time, professors of sonorous names and individual graduates of the program will meet here. The keynote speaker will be William Ury, co-founder of the Negotiation Program at Harvard University Law School in the US city of Cambridge. The celebrations will take place on Saturday, December 9.

Radim Parík completed a full negotiation program at Harvard University, which he concluded by completing the Harvard Negotiation Master Class. In 2005, Chris Voss, the FBI's former chief negotiator with the kidnappers, also enrolled in the program. “It is thus possible to expect that the greatest legends and leaders of negotiation will meet here among the graduates of the program,” predicts Radim Parík, president of the Association of Negotiators. Parík is not only a Harvard negotiation graduate, he is the only personal pupil of Chris Voss in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the only co-author of his new book Empathetic Leadership from the European Union.

Prominent figures in the negotiation also include Professor William Ury. “He is an impossibly charismatic gentleman with a perfect speech. It is not for nothing that William Ury is one of the most popular educators of all of Harvard University,” explains Radim Parík. Ury was the author of two important books that influenced the field of negotiation. The first is called Getting to Yes, and Willliam Ury wrote it with other Harvard professors, Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton.

“Although Getting To Yes was intended to serve as a guide to softening U.S. international policy, it has taken hold in public as a guaranteed guide to successful negotiations and as a trading strategy. Today, this tactic is far advanced, and it is to the credit of Professor Ury, who realized in time that, in negotiations or in business, leading to yes means limiting the freedom of counterparties and trading partners. People just feel freer if they can say 'no' than 'yes'. Ury therefore responded by writing the book Getting Past No and continued to elaborate the whole concept in The Power Of a Positivive No,” added Radim Parík.

In the individual sessions of the Harvard Symposium, the world's leading negotiating experts will discuss topics such as reopening international water agreements, how countries negotiate new borders and how to deal with each other, for example, water supply depletion. They will discuss negotiation in relation to artificial intelligence, which is changing the way negotiation is studied, learned and conducted. This will be followed by discussions on how best to teach negotiation, whether to rely on real cases, what combinations of simulations to choose or how to use artificial intelligence assistance. Graduates of the negotiation programme will also tackle the issue of international climate negotiation, i.e. how to negotiate successfully in a rigid process where more than 190 governments negotiate on hundreds of technical and political issues. Last but not least, the theme of “gender and privilege in bargaining” will be raised, presenting the results of the latest surveys and pointing to the profession of bargaining in relation to racial or LGBTQ+ identity.

‍