I help you reach breakthrough results in your negotiations, conflicts, and critical conversations.   

Client was an Asian global upstream oil and gas producer. They were in the middle of license negotiations with a government in south east Asia in order to license several offshore blocks of oil reserves. Simultaneously, they were also involved in negotiations with five local and global competitors and service providers over the prospective division of ownership and maintenance of the block. I worked with their deal teams to: 

• Develop a clearer map of the parties' underlying interests and motivations; 

• Identify a full set of motivations behind the counterparty negotiation teams, beyond the already-identified interests of costs and time; 

• Re-examine assumptions about which parties to approach at what time (sequencing) and to consider a new more productive sequence for negotiating with the parties;

• Re-examine assumptions about the motivations of the individuals within the counterparty teams and test new approaches based on refreshed psychological profiles; 

• Roll-up the above insights into a specific negotiation strategy that the client team recognized to be a superior strategy versus their previous strategy. 

Client was a biotech company developing an mRNA solution for lung-related diseases. They were looking to out license their technology to a major Japanese pharma company and just started negotiating a term sheet. But without a clear rationale for their desired terms, and in the absense of a strong alternative deal, they felt weak vis-a-vis their large counterpart and sought support. I worked with the founding team to: 

• Re-articluate their technology's value proposition in clear (and larger) financial terms; 

• Psychologically de-anchor from the terms of the counterpart's counterproposals and steer the terms of conversation in a more favorable direction with fresh rationales; 

• Rehearse negotiation positions and develop greater confidence in their ability to navigate challenging situations during the negotiations; 

• Determine the marginal financial value of a partnership with the Japanese counterpart versus partnerships with other potential partners with the startup's network; 

• Define a strategy for outreach to additional potential partners and place a value on those potential engagements. 

​Client was a partner of a US venture capital firm. The partner was involved in a dispute withanother co-founder over the terms of the latter's exit from the firm. Since the terms of thepartnership were vague, there was wide room for interpretation on what a fair deal could looklike. I worked with the VC partner to: 

• Change his overall negotiation strategy, shifting focus from notional compromise to insisting on benchmarks of how similar disputes have been handled in the past;

• Expand the scope of negotiations from purely financial terms to other terms that satisfiedinterests of the co-founded that had not been previously identified;

• Appropriately leverage specific tactics to defuse tactics used by his co-founder;

• Save millions of dollars in future payouts on the ultimate terms of the exit agreement.

Client was a high net worth family in South America involved in a years-long dispute over the ownership and the sale of thousands of acres of land to one of the world's largest mining companies.  I worked with the family elders and younger generation family members to:

• Map the entire set of actors, tease out their interests and motivations, and re-frame the balances of power in play and the implications for our strategy going forward;

• Develop strategic options, get feedback on those options, and align around a long-term course of action with immediate next steps;

• Re-calibrate our strategy as new information came in, with the ultimate goal of maximizing transaction value of the land.   

Client was an international development organization operating in Eastern Europe. It was facing problems with regional partners that resulted in sub-optimal collaboration and productivity. I worked with the client's senior management to: 

• Identify the root-causes of the sub-optimal relationships with regional partners;

• Mediate between senior stakeholders to refresh the basis of a productive relationship;

• Introduce conflict management tools the teams could use to manage future challenges. 

Client was a global upstream oil and gas producer. They were in the middle of license negotiations with a government in the Middle East over a production license that was about to expire, with the aim of renewing the license. The deal team sought support in trouble-shooting the negotiations, which were essentially stuck without progress. I worked with their deal teams to: 

• Identify non-obvious counterparties with potential behind-the-scenes influence over the obvious / actual counterparties to the negotiations on the government side;

• Analyze the positions versus the interests of the government counterparties in order to clarify each individual counterparty's priorities and constraints in their negotiations;

• Scenario-plan for different moves the government could make over the coming months, assign probabilities to each scenario, and prepare tactical responses for each scenario; 

• Provide personalized feedback on each individual client team member's negotiation behavior profiles in order to strengthen their negotiation capacity in future negotiations.