International Negotiation - Harboco

From the exercise of Harboco, I have learned three valuable lessons in multiple-parties negotiation: identify relative power of each part, find each party’s best interest, and ally with key parties. Before started negotiation process of this case, I felt overwhelmed after I read case and job description. At time, I was thinking, “Oh my god!! I couldn’t even master 1 on 1 negotiation yet and now we have 6 parties while each side has different degree of interests in 5 categories!!” I was very clueless and in deep doubt that all parties could even reach an eventual agreement. However, after tried to answer questions listed by you, I started getting better sense where to go and how to formula strategy for negotiation process. To start with, I ranked relative power of every party. In my opinion, I saw DCR and Harboco as most powerful because they could veto any proposals that they didn’t like. In contrary, I ranked environment league and other ports as least powerful because they didn’t really have control over whether project would be built or not while rated myself, as representative of union, and governor in the middle. For approval of this project, only 5 votes of yes required. At same time, after carefully analyzing each party’s best interest, I saw that at least four parties want this project to happen, including myself. This gave me very comfortable assurance. As soon as I realized that, I knew that all I needed for this negotiation was to get additional ally, either from environmental league or from other ports. Even better, on my score sheet, ecological impact didn’t really affect my score, and I saw that as great bargaining chip to gain support from environmental league. On the other side, I found that not only governor would like this project to happen, but also he was on union side and would like to see maximum employment opportunity for union members, while unlimited union preference account for most substantial part on my score sheet. Having those