Dr. Alison Wood Brooks

You learn great frameworks about how to do it better.

But even as I was teaching this great class and I could feel that my students were getting so much value from it, I realized that we were missing something.

Okay.

When I think about negotiations, you realize, how often am I doing this?

How often are you doing this?

Maybe you're negotiating for a new car or a new house or a higher salary.

I don't know, maybe once every two months, maybe.

Mm-hmm.

And what I started to realize is like, wait, but we have to talk to people all day long every day.

And I don't think of those as negotiations.

That seems like a different nut to crack.

And many of our students at Harvard are actually already quite strategics.

So some of the lessons that we're teaching them in negotiation are pretty intuitive to them.

We're taking strategic people and like teaching them to be even more strategic.

And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I think what these people need might be, how do we teach them to be more engaging and fun and funny and interesting and dynamic and more empathic?

Where's the course that can help them to do that?

And there wasn't one.

They've tried many ways over the years, and none of them have really stuck.

Oh my gosh, communication is challenging for a million reasons.