"Creative conflict" with negotiation expert Bill Sanders

The MBA Association is delighted to invite Bill Sanders, co-author of Creative Conflict: A Practical Guide for Business Negotiators, to host a webinar on negotiation, taking place on Wednesday, 8 September at 6.30pm.

Negotiation is stuck. It’s time for something new. Almost everything is negotiable. Almost every interaction is a negotiation. And in no field is this clearer than in business, where every day we work with others to get things done. But when we have real differences, is win-win always possible? Or must every negotiation be a zero-sum battle, with a winner and a loser?

In Creative Conflict, negotiation experts Bill Sanders and Frank Mobus use a dynamic, dialectical approach to show how negotiations are driven by competition and cooperation at the same time. Counterintuitively, they reveal that conflict lies at the heart of more profitable agreements. They believe that when we tiptoe around conflict, we negotiate in a half-hearted way that limits our results. By contrast, creative negotiators probe and push until they hit a wall of disagreement, and then they figure out how to get past it. The authors construct a clear and useful framework based on three distinct negotiating contexts: Bargaining, Creative Dealmaking, and Relationship Building.

Bill Sanders is a negotiation expert and CEO of Mobus Creative Negotiating, a corporate training and consulting company with clients including AT&T, Skansa and BorgWarner. Over the last 30 years, he has helped 10 head coaches become Super Bowl champions.