strategy
Regarded bymany as the world’s leading negotiator, Prof Stuart Diamond has advised companies and governments on conflict resolution, and in 2008 was responsible for settling the seemingly intractable Hollywood writers’ strike. He spoke to Ann O’Dea
According to Stuart Diamond we are always negotiating, whether making a business deal, talking to friends or even driving a car. It’s the basic form of all human interaction, he says, and most of us are terrible at it. Diamond is a recognised authority on the subject: he runs the most popular course atWharton Business School and has advised major corporations and governments on conflict resolution. In February 2008 he was called in to resolve the infamous Hollywood writers’ strike, something that was achieved in a matter of days. Diamond was in Dublin recently to speak at
the John Hume Institute at University College Dublin, and we caught up with him to talk about his latest book Getting More – How you can negotiate to succeed in work and life. Stuart Diamond attributes his early inter-
est in the art of negotiation to his days as a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. “The book is based on the formal research I’ve done in the last 20 years and the observations I’ve made over 40 years, since all of life involves negotiation. “For the first 20 years I was a journalist and
I found, by trial and error in the first few years, that if I focused less on facts and more on the perceptions in people’s heads I could get trust from people very quickly, and they would tell me all sorts of stuff that they didn’t tell anybody else,” says Diamond. “So I printed lots of stories that won prizes and I used that to develop a career with The New York Times where I won the Pulitzer.”
He subsequently went to Harvard Law
School where he met the team behind the bestselling Getting to Yes. “I found a bunch of people who had taken this field, which I had been mining unbeknownst to me, and tried to make a structure out of it. They gave names to things so you could replicate them and I thought that was cool.” Working with his colleagues for three years,
his talent was quickly spotted and he was made associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, as well as head of its out- side consulting. “When I began to teach the subject I found something lacking in what they did. There was a group at Wharton that was working on this, so I went there to get my MBA and began to teach. This was when I began to develop what became this book.” “I’ve taught 30,000 people in 45 countries,
from country leaders to administrative assis- tants, people from all walks of life, and I found that the same process could and should be used in any situation, whether it’s kids, diplomacy or business. “Secondly, I found that most of the directions people are given to deal with each other are not effective in meet- ing the goals of the people who use them. That is not to say they can’t get agreements, but they’re often not very good ones. “And if you look at the world around you that’s what you see. You see people get
38 Irish Director Winter 2010
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