How Entertainment Lawyer John Branca Negotiated for the Beatles Songs Catalog
In 1985, pop music superstar Michael Jackson instructed his attorney, John Branca, to bid for the Northern Songs music catalog, which contained the songs of the Beatles. In a challenging negotiation, Branca secured the rights to the collection.
Over the next three decades, first as Jackson’s attorney and later as the executor of his estate, Branca undertook numerous complex negotiations to secure and expand Jackson’s music publishing empire until it became the largest music publishing company in the world.
Harvard Business School professor James K. Sebenius joins host Brian Kenny and a live audience of Harvard Business School alumni to discuss how to deal with tough negotiators effectively and ethically in his case, John Branca: “Negotiating the Beatles’ Northern Songs Catalog.”
BRIAN KENNY: Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “negotiation” as a discussion or dialogue between two or more parties with the goal of reaching an agreement or resolving a conflict. The word originates from the root of two Latin words: “neg” meaning “without,” and “otium” meaning “ease.” Put them together and you get “without ease,” which probably seems apropos for anyone who has ever been engaged in high-stakes negotiations, or with toddlers and teenagers. It’s not for the faint of heart. As Henry Kissinger said, “It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe that you can gain the upper hand in a negotiation.” Which is a not-so-diplomatic way of saying, “Some things are better left to professionals.” Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor James Sebenius to discuss the case, “John Branca Negotiating the Beatles Northern Songs Catalog.” I’m your host Brian Kenny and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.
So, for those of you who are listening to our podcast as our usual listeners, you’re not aware, but we’re actually taping this in front of a live audience at Harvard Business School during Alumni Reunion weekend. Folks make some noise so they can hear you.
Right now I’m going to start with Jim. Let me introduce you Jim. Jim Sebenius isn’t just a member of the negotiations unit at Harvard Business School, he founded it. He also directs the Harvard Negotiation project at Harvard Law School. In addition to his research and teaching on the topic, Jim has been directly involved in numerous complex negotiations and he brings that experience to his new podcast, Dealcraft. He’s a fellow podcaster and you can find that podcast on Apple Spotify, all the podcast places. So, make sure that you tune into that. And Jim is joining us fresh back from the Middle East where he was there last week talking to Israeli and Palestinian diplomats and business leaders. You must be a little exhausted.
JIM SEBENIUS: A little tired, but I guess that’s not a great marker of success, is it?
BRIAN KENNY: I guess it’s not. But great that you’re there doing some important work and teaching some diplomacy in a part of the world that really gravely needs it. And great to have you here today to talk about this particular case, the John Branca case. I found it really interesting. Many of us will remember that when this deal happened, this was an enormous deal of Michael Jackson securing the catalog, the Beatles catalog. I don’t think anybody really gave a lot of thought to the negotiations that went on behind the scene. And having read the case, I can tell you it brings up all kinds of really interesting topics. So thanks for writing it. Thanks for being here to talk about it. Let me ask you to start by telling us what the central theme is in the case and what your cold call is when you start the discussion.
JIM SEBENIUS: So thanks Brian, I appreciate it and thank you for showing up. I think this will be kind of fun. This case, I think having taught it now a few times is really about one of the topics that students and senior executives in those find most vexing. Because it’s one thing to say negotiation has all sorts of cooperative potential and win-win and create value and so forth, which I’m a firm believer in. But I think the question that it vexes many people is how do you deal with really hard bargainers both effectively and ethically? And that’s really the broader theme that this case is about. And the specific cold call that I use, you haven’t read the case, so I’m going to fill in just a tiny bit of background. Michael Jackson, he started to become quite wealthy, Thriller was an enormous success, and people came to him and said, “Do you want tax shelters? Do you want to buy real estate? Do you want to buy something else?”
And he went to his friend Paul McCartney, who said, “I collect publication rights, the words and the music, not the master recordings, but the words and the music for use anywhere, and maybe you’d be interested in that too?” And Jackson really was. And in fact, he began to ask his lawyer, John Branca, to begin to find different catalogs. So he bought Sly and the Family Stone and some other things. Well, long story short, it became almost out of the blue that the Beatles catalog, which was Northern Songs owned by something called ATV was available, was on the market. And we’ll go through some of the process, but the cold call question is, you, John Branca on behalf of Michael Jackson have been told, “Do not let this catalog go, it is mine. But don’t overnegotiate or pay too much.”
And so, he’s done a couple of handshake deals with Robert Holmes à Court who owned and controlled this. Holmes à Court has reneged on those handshake deals. He’s gone up two or three. Another pair has come up and bid much more than most people think it’s worth. Branca is trying to figure out, here’s the question, what do you do?
BRIAN KENNY: I’m always curious about not only what motivates faculty to write about a particular topic, but why does it make for a good case? What do you think in this instance makes this a good case?
JIM SEBENIUS: Well, you always get interest when there’s a highly salient industry and people who are well-known, and in my world, people who also turn out to be really remarkable negotiators. If I can both interview them extensively, use clips for those in the class, which makes it very real. And it’s a case of something that people really care about. And I think here, the thing, which I mentioned earlier, is when you’re dealing with really hard bargainers who bargain in a way that you find quite unethical, but they’re deals that you really want and you really need to have happen, what do you do? How do you handle that? And this is not an uncommon problem, and I think this case really reflects that. So the other piece is, although we’ll focus on a subset of the negotiations in this case, this is not a specific deal per se. Yes, it involves the acquisition of the Beatles catalog for Michael Jackson, but several subsequent deals, which is true of lots of negotiations. It’s not just one shot, but you’re then dealing with other people around the same issue as it evolves. So the catalog becomes a very big part of a joint venture with Sony. The Sony deal actually becomes bigger. And when Jackson passes away, that has other places. Branca’s involved all the way through. So it’s not a deal. It’s a deal over time with lots of players that influenced each other.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, Branca was really young when this case starts. Michael Jackson was such an enigmatic figure. Particularly at this point in his career, there’s a lot of mystique around him. How does Branca come to know him and come to work for him?
JIM SEBENIUS: Well, Branca’s a fascinating guy, and I got to know him through an odd coincidence. He turns out to be a co-executor of the Jackson Estate when Jackson died in 2009. And a fifth of Jackson’s estate was supposed to go to charities involving children. And the program on negotiation, I’m not a lawyer, but I do head the Harvard negotiation project across the River at the Law School, they were very interested in negotiation for young people. And so Branca came to us and I began talking to him and I realized that he really was a fascinating guy. Just a couple of factoids. He’s had over 30 of his clients in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That starts with Dylan and the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys all the way to Dr. Dre-
BRIAN KENNY: Amazing.
JIM SEBENIUS: … and Elton John. When you talk to him, this is not my world, but it’s kind of fun to hang around. In any case, when he shows up for classes, which he sometimes does… And he has kind of a checkered history in the sense that he dropped out of high school, he became a drug addict, he had a band, the band got a major contract, and for a year it opened for The Doors. So this guy is really kind of unusual. He just realized he probably wouldn’t make it in that world. So he went back to junior college, then ultimately law school and became a crack lawyer. He was 29 years old when Michael Jackson became 21 and could get out from under the thumb of his really domineering father, Joe Jackson, who had kind of managed the then Jackson Five and Michael was really keen to get out. They met in a law office. Branca was a junior guy in an entertainment law firm in Los Angeles. And Jackson basically said, “Haven’t I met you before?” And John said, “I don’t think so.” But he raised his sunglasses and then in effect, “I like you, but are you as good as Mickey Rudin?” Mickey Rudin was Frank Sinatra’s legendary music lawyer. He said, “I’m better.” Confidence is not in short supply with Branca. And in the early years, just to kind of bring us up to this case, Branca fairly quickly proved himself by getting a lot more money for Jackson in certain contracts. He raised money for a completely unusual and unorthodox at the time film, which was Thriller. That was a fascinating situation. By the way, he was solely responsible on the business side of this. When you said notorious or mystique, there’s a dark side to that as well. And it was an on and off relationship. He went from the 80s to the 90s and then he was off the payroll and then he was on, and then he was off and back on. When you look at his first wedding picture, which I could show you, but we’ll hold off on that, you have Little Richard officiating. Michael Jackson is the best man. Anyway, I won’t say that that was his last marriage either, but that’s another story.
BRIAN KENNY: You mentioned earlier Michael Jackson said, “I don’t want to lose this deal.” Clearly he was passionate about it. When anybody’s passionate about something, even if you love a house, you’re house hunting and you want to buy that house, you don’t want to lose the deal, right? How does that affect Michael Jackson’s ability to be impartial in this thing? And what does that mean for Branca as he’s thinking about negotiating it?
JIM SEBENIUS: Branca has on the wall in his office, this note. Branca had brought the possibility of buying the Beatles catalog and Jackson had a set of investment advisors, people he really trusted. And these were serious industry people like David Geffen, who for Geffen records, John Johnson, who at that time was the richest African American, started Jet and Ebony and a series of other people he had. And the music industry people, the record labels had all passed on this because they thought it was way too expensive. But Jackson just thought, “This is a gem.” You’ve got economic question marks, but Branca is then basically told, “Don’t over-negotiate.” And then he told him privately, “Don’t pay too much, but do not come back without it.” Okay. Because as Branca said, “You don’t say no to Michael.”
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and I’ll just say for our listeners who are listening, what we’re looking at right now is a handwritten note it looks like from Michael Jackson to Branca.
JIM SEBENIUS:
He passed that note to Branca in the meeting where they were evaluating whether or not to go ahead with the-
BRIAN KENNY: He basically says, “Don’t bargain. I’ve lost deals that way before.”
JIM SEBENIUS: “Lost a lot of deals that way, don’t do that. Except, don’t overpay.”
BRIAN KENNY: Michael Jackson obviously moved in heady circles and Branca eventually had to check with some of the people in those circles, including Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono before moving forward with the deal. Why did he feel it was important to do that?
JIM SEBENIUS: Well, Michael Jackson was close friends with both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, and he said, “I desperately want this, but I don’t want it if they don’t want me to have it.” In other words, if they don’t want it sold. Jackson gave Branca Yoko Ono’s number called up. She said, “I’d much rather have another artist own this than some company.” And then he talked to John Eastman, who was Paul McCartney’s brother-in-law and attorney and said, “Would Paul have any problem with this?” Because why does he want to pay 40 or 50 million to ransom the songs that he himself owned? And there’s a long story about how they lost control of it, but it had to do with British tax laws and this and that. And Eastman said, “No, that’s way too much money. Paul would never want to buy something that in effect he created.” And that actually turned out not to be true. But he got the go-ahead directly from Yoko Ono and indirectly from McCartney’s brother-in-law and attorney.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and I guess it’s naive to think that’s an asset that you create, you own it forever. That’s just not how it works.
JIM SEBENIUS: No, ask Taylor Swift.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Let’s talk about Robert Holmes à Court. So he was the person who had control of this catalog. He was the one that you’re negotiating with. What’s he like to deal with?
JIM SEBENIUS: In Branca’s experience, they shook hands on more than one deal, one for an initial 37 and a half million dollars, then for 40, then for 47. And each time he thought he had a handshake deal, in fact, enough to do a lot of expensive due diligence. And then Holmes à Court would use that to leverage another offer. And so it was a frustrating and dicey piece. Holmes à Court was also highly analytical and he was intimidating, but not in a pound the table kind of way.
BRIAN KENNY: Talk a little bit about Branca’s strategy of due diligence well before he had a deal in place. So this is a long play thing for him.
JIM SEBENIUS: So after he had a handshake deal in this case for the initial offer, which was pretty aggressive, they thought at 37 and a half million. Branca thought, “Well, let’s be persuasive that we can close this and also make sure that the property in fact is… The title is right and the rights are in place and so on and so forth.” So he hired two dozen people to go through Northern Songs. The most famous parts were 251 Beatles songs, but there were also songs by Ray Charles and the Pointer Sisters and a whole bunch of other parties. And he spent over a million dollars of Michael Jackson’s money kind of showing that he was earnest about it and also making sure that the deal could close.
And I remember asking John about that because I said, “That does show that you’re serious, but if you’re dealing with a guy like Holmes à Court and you’ve now sunk a million dollars and this is in 1984, a million dollars of your client’s money into this, and now he knows that if you don’t come back, you’ve just wasted this, he probably feels that you’re in an even worse position and is likely to exploit it.” So I think if you were doing that one again, and in talking with Branca, I think he would’ve said this. What you probably do when you figured out the kind of person you’re dealing with is you say you build a due diligence clause that’s very exacting as to what is going to be checked out as a contingency of the deal when the deal is firm. Because doing it in advance essentially put him in a weaker position because if he didn’t get the deal, it wasn’t just not getting the deal, it was not getting the deal and wasting a lot of money, which in today’s dollars, probably 3 or 4 million.
BRIAN KENNY: How was he able to stay competitive in these negotiations given the fact that Holmes à Court was so capricious in who he was inviting in and not really respecting the handshake deals that they had?
JIM SEBENIUS: Well, if you kind of track this, and the way I teach it, I gave you the question at the outset, but the way that I teach usually is I get people to say, okay, you’ve had a handshake deal in 37.5, and then, “No, it wasn’t quite that. Now it was 40.” And then it’s 47.5, and this is higher than the record companies were willing to go. It was more than most of advisors thought this thing was worth but you still really want this thing, so what do you do? And it’s fun to have a discussion and people are pretty inventive, some of whom are highly ethical. Some suggest things that maybe you would rather not have recorded.
But what I typically do then, having interviewed Branca at length, both on various stages and otherwise, is I turn to him and I say, “So John, what would you do in this circumstance?” And so for example, in a class recently, I said, “So how do you handle this?” Because he’s been dealing on the phone with Holmes à Court, and then he has to sort of figure, “Okay, now what am I going to do so this doesn’t keep happening?’
John Branca: Then what happened, he got to the point where he signed a deal. First I went in and I said, “This man thinks he knows who I am.” I may be young, he may be a billionaire. So I went in with a leather jacket, with a needle on the bank and long hair just to say, “Listen, buddy, you might think you know who you’re dealing with, and this is going to keep going, but it’s not.” So then I find out he signs the deal for 50 million with Koppelman and Bandier. Our final offer was 47.5.
JIM SEBENIUS: So there’s a point here where you can then have an interesting conversation about what you might do because Marty Bandier and Charles Koppelman were in the business and they had just started a new company and they had bid, and Holmes à Court had accepted an offer for 47.5. So you could kind of imagine how there’s an interesting classroom discussion about “what do you do?” in this circumstance. And I’m tempted to turn it to you guys, but you can’t.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s a podcast.
JIM SEBENIUS: So we’ll imagine we can see lots of thought bubbles going up and what they would do, so he does something that raises some interesting questions.
John Branca: What I did was I investigated their source of financing because I knew they weren’t writing a check for 50 million, and I found out that our friends at MCA Universal of the same people that had put out ET. But at that time, Irving Azov was running their music label. And Irving had been a friend, he had been an advisor on the Victory tour, and he was going to administer the rights and give them a big advance. That was part of their financial package. So I went to Irving and I asked him to pull his financing, which he agreed to do. And once that happened, they couldn’t close the deal. So then I got a call from-
JIM SEBENIUS: You knew that they couldn’t close at that point because that was the keystone for their financing?
John Branca: Correct.
JIM SEBENIUS: And Irving was willing to do this. Why? Why would he agree to pull it?
John Branca: I think there were maybe two or three reasons. Number one, we had hired him to be a consultant on the Victory Tour to help keep his eye on Chuck Sullivan and Don King and the whole cast of characters. And so he was on team Michael Jackson. Number two, he was new at that label. That label had never been successful. So he wanted friends, I think I was probably more valuable to him than Charles and Marty. And number three, it was Michael Jackson. Nobody was sure at that time where Charles and Marty were really headed in the business because they were starting their own company. They weren’t-
JIM SEBENIUS: Did you have any qualms about doing that?
John Branca: Not for a second.
JIM SEBENIUS: Yeah.
John Branca: All’s fair.
JIM SEBENIUS: And it may be also after Holmes à Court had reneged a few times.
John Branca: Yes.
JIM SEBENIUS: It wasn’t like you felt there was any moral obligation to him.
John Branca: None whatsoever.
JIM SEBENIUS: This leads to an interesting conversation, right about, “Okay, you’ve essentially disabled your competitor in a bidding situation. What do you think about that?” It was certainly effective, but is that okay? And you get a pretty rich discussion about whether it’s okay. And one of the reasons I particularly like this case is it comes from the world. We didn’t make this stuff up. We didn’t think it up in sort of an philosophical article on ethics. Okay, here’s the situation, and are you a poker player and you say, “This is fine?” Are you an idealist? And you say, “I’d never do anything of the sort. I’d always be fully transparent. I never mislead or never do anything to my competition.” Or are you a pragmatist? Someplace in between? Is it intrinsically right or wrong? And how does that affect relationships? It’s a rich discussion and one that I don’t like to preach. I do later, but not now.
JIM SEBENIUS: All right, so here’s this.
John Branca: When your financing fell through Holmes à Court had his lieutenant called me and he said, “Well, Mr. Holmes à Court would like you to come to London.” I said, “I’m not going anywhere.” He said, “No, well, he really wants you to come. You can get some serious business.” I said, “First of all, I’m not talking to you anymore. Don’t call me again. If he has anything to say, you can tell him to call me.” So he calls me, he said, “I’ll buy your plane ticket to come to London.” I said, “I don’t need you to buy my plane ticket and I’m not coming.” “Well, why wouldn’t you come?” I said, “Because we found another catalog we like more and we’re closing on that and we’re on a fast track.” So everything changed at that point. And he said, “I guarantee you, if you come to London, we will sign.” I said, “First of all, don’t believe a word you say. You send me the signing documents and let me have my lawyers review them.”
JIM SEBENIUS: So you begin to get a sense, and this raises another question. He doesn’t have another catalog that he’s going to buy. He’s not going to walk away or he doesn’t want to walk away. That would be tough. And yet, by credibly suggesting… And how did he credibly suggest? First of all, he doesn’t show up like a young button-down lawyer on the make right. He shows up as a crazy man back into his musician days in big leather jacket and long hair and sort of seemingly unpredictable. Does that make it more credible that he will in fact walk away? And then he says, “We have an alternative that we like better. We’re closing on that.” He has ascertained that his counterpart has no alternative at this point, right? So second, he says, “We’re walking, we’re going someplace else.” And all of a sudden that turns around. That was a calculated risk, but it was not an irrational, impulsive moment. It was done in this kind. And then they do it and the deal. Holmes à Court, they go ahead and sign it. I think he has 500 documents to sign. Those of you who’ve been through closings have a sense of what this actually involves. There just seems to be like this Columbo moment, “just one more thing.” And this thing’s, oh no.
BRIAN KENNY: You just dated yourself significantly.
JIM SEBENIUS: No question. And so he said, “I’d really like it if Michael would agree to come to Perth to play for my favorite charity” Which is there. And Michael had never performed in Australia, and he wanted this catalog enough that he was going to do it. And Branca also knew that that was really important to Holmes à Court, and nobody could match that because Michael wouldn’t. So it was like a deal term that made the deal. It wasn’t just you could match commodity money, but you couldn’t match this other piece because Michael said, “I won’t do it otherwise.” Second thing is they were talking and there was still this kind of hesitation. And John had done a lot of background actually on Homes a Court. His daughter was named Penny and his daughter Penny loved “Penny Lane.” And so they deeded “Penny Lane” to Holmes à Court’s daughter. She owns it, she doesn’t get any money for it, and they still administer it, but she has the legal ownership of Penny Lane and that closed the deal. So these things are not just purely financial at all.
BRIAN KENNY: No, no. There’s a human element here that’s really important.
There’s almost a throwaway line in the case too, as he’s waiting to go to the meeting, he’s going to take the Concord. So he’s waiting in the airport lounge and his phone rings. Who’s making that call?
JIM SEBENIUS: Richard Branson. And Richard Branson is a man known for brilliant, impulsive behavior, and he said, “John, I understand that the ATV catalog is for sale. Do you think I should bid on it?” And Branca is just about to get on the Concord to go to London to close the deal. And he’s really trying to figure out what to say. Because he thinks Branson could easily just say, “I’ll bid two million more than whatever you bid, and we’ll just keep going until whatever.” And so he says, “Well, if you were going to do that, you’d have to deal with Yoko and you’d have to deal with Paul and the very difficult people and so forth and so on.”
BRIAN KENNY: But he never says that he’s working the deal with Michael Jackson.
JIM SEBENIUS: He does not say that he’s doing that. Branson, it turns out, is just about to take a balloon flight across the Atlantic. And so he’s going to be incommunicado for a week during which time Branca hopes to close.
BRIAN KENNY: Because who doesn’t do that, right? Take a balloon flight.
JIM SEBENIUS: Anyway, the balloon disintegrates, he falls in the ocean. Anyway, and then when he gets back to London, he discovers that the deal has been gotten out from under him and is extremely unhappy. And I have to censor John when he describes the words that Branson used about American lawyers. Because the other piece is Branson had used John Branca’s entertainment firm for some other stuff, right? So he wasn’t a client of Branca, but he was a client of the firm. So this gets really murky. And I pressed him on this. I said, “Would you do this now? At the time you were relatively young, this was the most important thing. Would you do that?” And he said, “I don’t think I would do that now. I think now what I would say is, ‘Richard, we are just about to close on this deal. We’ve worked it really hard. I’m sure I can help you on 100 other things, and I’d like to do that. If we don’t close in the next couple of days, it’s wide open, but will you respect that?’“ He said, “I probably would’ve done that now.” But anyway, that’s what he did at the time.
BRIAN KENNY: Were there long-term implications for artists in terms of the way this deal was negotiated? And if so, what were some of those?
JIM SEBENIUS: Well, the fascinating thing is when Branca got to London to do all the signing, and Charles and Marty actually called him at this Savoy where he was staying and said, “How come you’re in London?” And he sort of said, “Oh, I’m working on a deal.” And anyway, so they get the deal done and they’re on the plane on the Concord again, which was still at that time flying back to New York. And Charles and Marty are seated behind him. And then he turns around and they say, “Wow, that was really impressive. You really outfoxed us. If we’re ever doing another deal, we want to hire you.” And so it turned out that for them, whose financing had been pulled by this guy’s machinations, this was just fine. And in fact, they hired him to do some other deals. That was fine. The second thing was Richard Branson was really annoyed, but Branca, true to his word, managed to get the Steel Wheels thing from the Rolling Stones that really had a lot to do with launching Virgin Records. The irony is the relationship that was ruptured in this whole thing was between Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, and he had tried to do exactly the right thing there, and that’s the one that was just never repaired. And it had been a very close relationship.
BRIAN KENNY: Has the industry or the legal system changed in such a way that you wouldn’t be able to do a deal this way today? Is there more transparency required?
JIM SEBENIUS: I think in a situation like this, I think this could still happen. One of the interesting things in the Negotiation course is we try to do two things, and one is ask at a bare minimum, what is the law about doing negotiations? Because a lot of people think it’s all personal ethics and it’s not. There can be fraud involved in negotiations and not just things like fraudulent conveyance, but things like if somebody reasonably relies on a statement that you made to do something that’s disadvantageous, then they may have a claim against you. Those are extremely rare to prosecute because in bargaining, things happen. But I think at a minimum, you want to get into what some of the legal aspects are.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Jim, this has been a great conversation. I knew it would be. If there’s one thing you want people to remember about this case, one takeaway from it, what would it be?
JIM SEBENIUS: I think it would be to know who you’re dealing with. And that means to really do serious due diligence on your counterpart. Because you don’t want to play into their hand. You don’t want to assume that they’re a carbon copy of you. And you can find out a lot these days about people in negotiations. I might just say, there’s a long tail to this case that goes on in the rest of it, and we won’t go into it in depth, but Jackson gets in financial trouble. Sony decides they want to buy half the catalog for $75 million. Jackson calls up Branca and says, “Is that a good idea?” Branca says, “No, it’s a terrible idea.” In any case, when the dust clears, Sony ends up paying 110 million. Over the 30-year life of this asset, it had over a 30% internal rate of return. Which was just really an extraordinary thing. Well over a billion dollars. And it was the keystone to all kinds of other stuff. It made a substantial difference. But when you look at these things and you sort of say, “All right, who are you dealing with? How much are they going to be trying to find something that’s mutually beneficial?
BRIAN KENNY: Listen, if you like what you’ve heard today from Jim, you’re going to have to listen to his podcast. I want to give him a minute to show us or tell us a little bit about it.
JIM SEBENIUS: Over the last 20 plus years, there is a program on negotiation that some of you may be familiar with having gotten bombarded with emails or otherwise for negotiation programs. And it’s a consortium of MIT, the Sloan School and elsewhere, the professional schools at Harvard, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, Brandeis. About 60 faculty who were interested in all kinds of negotiation as their primary thing, whether it’s family deals or corporate deals or environmental deals or mediation or whatever. And we honor a “great negotiator” every year or two, and we write cases on them and we bring them to Harvard. And this is in addition to the normal case writing. And we’ve now just done this over a long period of time. And I realized they have two or three days, often a video of the best negotiators in the world talking about their most difficult deals and really probing on what they were in Dealcraft, and it’s insights from great negotiators.
Anybody from a terrific trade negotiator like Charlene Barshefsky or the woman who saved the Paris Climate Talks, Cristiana Figueres or Steve Schwartzman, or just a range of people who have accomplished remarkable deals, typically over substantial barriers, and from whom we think we can learn a lot. So, we ask them, “Why’d you do this? What would you have done differently? What did you learn from it?” So forth. And so that’s what this podcast is about, and I hope some of you find it interesting, and if you do send it out.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s like the B case, you got to listen to it. Jim, thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call, and thank all of you for being here to listen. It’s been a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed it.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you, email us at [email protected]. Thanks again for joining us, I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
