Organizational Communication Commons^™

Riverton Press: An Exercise In Principled Negotiation, Joe Seltzer

Organization Management Journal

Negotiation is coming into increased use as a topic in business schools, with an emphasis on new approaches such as principled negotiation (Fisher, Ury, & Patton, 2011). This provides an alternative to the “position-based” negotiations of the labor–management tradition that used primarily distributive bargaining. While the literature has expanded, there seems to be a shortage of experiential exercises that work well. I present the “Riverton Press,” which is a two-person role-play that asks participants to negotiate using the ideas of principled negotiation. A short summary of the theory of principled negotiation, teaching notes, examples of classroom use and student responses, …