Prof. Diamond’s Negotiations Class at Wharton
January 15, 2010 – 4:53 pmI was lucky to have gotten Prof. Diamond’s Negotiation class this semester, and today was the first class. I had heard the class was good, but I would have never guessed just HOW good the class is.
Prof. Stuart Diamond is a legendary professor at Wharton, and his expertise and fame are spread far beyond the confines of Huntsman Hall. Here’s an excerpt from his bio available on the course website (oh yes – there is a dedicated website for the course: www.winwitheveryone.com):
“Stuart Diamond has taught and advised on negotiation and cultural diversity to corporate and government leaders in more than 40 countries, including in Eastern Europe, former Soviet Republics, China, Latin America, the Middle East, Canada, South Africa and the United States. He holds an M.B.A. with honors from Wharton Business School, ranked #1 globally by The Financial Times where he is currently a professor from practice. For more than 90% of the semesters over the past 13 years his negotiation course has been the most popular in the school based on the course auction, and he has won multiple teaching awards. He has taught negotiation at Harvard Law School, from which he holds a law degree and is a former Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He has directed a negotiation consulting firm in Cambridge, MA.”
He runs his own consulting shop called Global Strategy Group, runs a host of companies including an aviation business, and in his other careers he has won the Pulitzer Prize, written books and made documentaries, traded futures in New York, practiced law, founded successful start-ups, and worked in investment banking. In a word, he is amazing!
The class today was based on a case called Rating Wars, where two TV broadcast companies have to decide on what content to show with the goal of maximizing profits. The class was organized into teams of threes and fours, each team on both sides was then assigned a role – either one broadcast company or the other – and assigned an opponent team. The lecture room was divided by a makeshift curtain so that the companies could not see each other (as it would happen in real life):
Prof. Diamond starts the Negotiation course in January 2010.
We then used the information on payouts supplied with the case itself to make decisions on what programming we would choose and anticipate how our opponents would react to that choice. There was a lot of game theory involved, so I was able to use the knowledge from the Managerial Economics course with Prof. Weigelt who is by the way a renown game theorist.
We were also able to negotiate with our opponents on the issue of choice of programming both “companies” should take. I should not disclose the exact outcome of our exercise as doing so could potentially diminish the effect of the exercise for future students, but I will note that my amazing team did as well as a team could possibly do in this exercise!
It is courses like this, and people like Prof. Diamond and my team that practically every day make me think how wonderful a school is Wharton!