History & Track Record of Success With the Conference
The History Behind The Negotiation & Leadership Conference 2009
The original Negotiation Forum was founded by Charles Mulvey in 2004 as a 3-hour small production event held on a Friday evening with the goal of discussing negotiation topics to help extension students augment their negotiating capabilities. As a startup activity, these events eventually attracted a successful turnout at approximately 70 people. The event was put on twice per year 2004 until 2006. Topics included “Emotions in Negotiations” and “Psychology in Negotiations” with high profile speakers from Harvard University such as Harvard Law Professors Roger Fisher & Daniel Shapiro, and HBS Professor Deepak Malhotra.
In spring 2007, the Negotiation Forum was canceled due to a conflation of different reasons including funding issues as well as some other organizational challenges. The forum became defunct for one year until it was formalized and institutionalized under the rubric of the newly founded Harvard Extension Service & Leadership Society (HESLS) with Andre Bisasor as the Founding President, who also was the then 2007-2008 HESA Vice President. Believing that negotiation capability is a key leadership skill, Andre reformulated, expanded and re-launched the event as both a Negotiation & Leadership Forum, and resurrected it as a different event with the much noted success and record-breaking achievement with a turnout of over 240 people, tripling that of previous versions. Using his experience as a marketing management MBA, Andre (along with HESLS Vice President, Natalie Anderson) also reformulated the event to become a multi-stage, 6-hour conference with event complexity and program innovation that included 8 distinguished speakers, two topics, two panels and a light networking lunch. There was also the re-branding of the event as one with first-class professional management, a creative marketing approach and solid execution. The vision was to create an event that would:
- Take an innovative and practical look at issues that are either under-studied or otherwise that are trends shaping the field of negotiations with discussions among leading scholars and practitioners from business, law, government and academia;
- Foster an inter-university dimension that brings together those who are interested in negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership from Harvard University, and other Boston-area schools as well as the larger Cambridge and Boston community;
- Develop a comprehensive vehicle that would break the ceiling of low turnout among Extension students and stimulate interest at unprecedented levels.
- Showcase Extension students’ role as a leadership force within the Harvard student community; and
- Increase the profile of Extension students by putting on first class events that would compare to that of the premier student group events at other Harvard schools.
In May of 2008, the new Negotiation & Leadership Forum 2008 broke all records both in terms of the previous version of the original negotiation forum as well as in terms of any extension school student-led event in the entire history of the Harvard Division of Continuing Education. The event received notable media attention at Harvard including coverage in the May 8 Issue of the Harvard University Gazette as well as in the June-July issue of the Harvard Extension Alumni Association e-newsletter, the Extension Chord.
This year the event was upgraded to a full-day conference and has been transformed into the "The Negotiation & Leadership Conference 2009". The program was developed to be more robust and expansive as we sought to further implement our vision. In addition, this year the Harvard Association for Law and Business (HALB) and the Harvard Business School Caribbean Business Club (HBS CBC) joined in on this event as one that has inter-school student support. Other noteworthy characteristics include:
- It is the first university-wide student-run conference on negotiation at Harvard University
- It involves the first inter-faculty, interschool effort between student clubs at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Law School. This is consistent with the vision of the Provost Office for a “one-university” model
- It is also the first full-day, full-scale student-run conference at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education
The Negotiation & Leadership Conference presently is one of the most anticipated student group events, attracting significant interest among students, faculty and professionals alike and is made history again with the over 300 students that attended the event.
For more on the 2008 event, click here
For an Ethical, Accessible, and Responsible Student Government
