Negotiation and Dialogue

Developing beneficial sustainable agreements

Negotiation is crucial in all organisations and in virtually every aspect of life. Negotiating is deciding what to agree on and persuading the other party to agree. In order to decide and persuade, one has to gather the right information. Often standard approaches fail and innovative thinking is required. Once made, agreements must be implemented and enforced to succeed. These five skills - information-gathering, rational decision-making, persuasion, innovation, and implementation – constitute the negotiator’s tool kit. TCA will help clients to develop and strategically orchestrate these five skills, and to help them realise their full potential as negotiators.

Tim Cullen established the Oxford Programme on Negotiation, an Executive Education programme at the University of Oxford in 2002. This highly renowned programme at the Saïd Business School attracts top officials from governments and international organisations as well as senior executives from the private sector. Tim Cullen is Programme Director and TCA’s associate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sherman Roberts of The Ivy Faculty Consortium (TIFC) is the Academic Director.

While the five-day Oxford Programme on Negotiation is only available at Oxford University, TCA and TIFC design custom-made programmes of two or three days for clients, drawing on the faculty that are members of TIFC, most of whom have taught at the Oxford Programme on Negotiation. Most of the faculty are top advisors to decision-makers who undertake major negotiations and most have themselves been engaged directly in major negotiations. They are top academics all of whom have an outstanding reputation for their ability to engage interactively with classes as a group and with individuals.

Tim Cullen has developed a two-day negotiation programme which he teaches himself in two different versions. The public sector version is designed for governments and international organisations, while the private sector programme is provided to individual companies and as an open enrolment programme for corporate executives and lawyers. These programmes have been widely acclaimed by clients like the UN country team in Pyongyang, North Korea, and by LexisNexis, which, inter alia, organises high quality executive education programmes in East Asia.