A 30,000-word synthesis of MGT 6448 Negotiation, Mod I 2025, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, taught by Professor Jessica A. Kennedy.

"Most negotiators fail to create value. Why?" — Kennedy, Class 3

"You always have some leverage; your worst BATNA is continuing to look for a job." — Kennedy, Class 8

"Subjective value better predicts future negotiation decisions than economic value." — Curhan, Elfenbein & Xu, 2006

Why this masterclass exists

Negotiation is the most under-practiced executive skill. People who treat negotiation as an aptitude — some people have it, some don't — leave $5,000–$150,000 on the table at their first job offer alone, and far more across a career of vendor contracts, equity deals, joint ventures, real-estate transactions, hires, and exits. People who treat it as a learnable craft — Kennedy's central premise — close those gaps, leave their counterparts feeling better off, and build the relational capital that makes the next negotiation cheaper.

Kennedy's course is built around a stubborn empirical finding: most negotiators fail to create value. They leave money on the table, settle on positions instead of interests, anchor against themselves, miss logrolls hiding in plain sight, mistake silence for resistance, and confuse a single sale price for the whole shape of a deal. The cure is a small library of mental models, a planning discipline, and roughly nine reps of deliberate practice — which is exactly what the Mod I course delivers.

This masterclass is the operating system that falls out of those nine reps, plus the Lewicki/Barry/Saunders textbook and Kennedy's curated reading list. The aim is not encyclopedic coverage of negotiation theory — it is the smallest set of tools that lets a non-specialist walk into a high-stakes negotiation tomorrow morning and not embarrass themselves.

Three phrases that anchor the whole library

  1. "Prepare!" — Kennedy's pre-class mandate, repeated every session. The single biggest predictor of negotiation outcome is whether you walked in with a completed planning document. Not effort during the conversation. Preparation before it.
  2. "Avoid the fixed-pie bias." — The assumption that the other side's interests are directly opposed to yours is wrong in almost every multi-issue negotiation. Most deals are mixed-motive — they contain distributive, common-value, and integrative issues simultaneously — and only negotiators who test the assumption capture the integrative value.
  3. "Gauge negotiation success on three axes: deal, interaction, relationship." — Who got what is one axis. How you treated each other is the second. Whether you'd negotiate together again is the third. Negotiators who optimize only the first systematically destroy value across the second and third — and find their pool of future counterparts shrinking.

The shape of the masterclass

Ten modules trace the course's nine simulations in order, then add a tenth module on principles, ethics, and complex deals (the Bullard Houses → multiparty arc that closes the course). Each module follows the same pattern: