In the Classroom II
 Dealmaker

Stuart Diamond has literally stared down gun barrels in the process of negotiating. During the past 20 years, Diamond has traveled from the jungles of Asia and Africa to the boardrooms of North America to the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, hammering out business deals with partners from governments to CEOs to banana farmers. Along the way, he's also won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on the first space shuttle accident for The New York Times, launched numerous entrepreneurial startups, and spent time on the Street as an executive in an oil futures firm and as an attorney and investment banker. Between real-world deals, he teaches in Wharton's Executive Negotiation Workshop: Bargaining for Advantage™.

"My title at Wharton is practice professor, with the goal of bringing practical experience into the classroom. I'm always working on deals — M&As, financing acquisitions, startups, turnarounds — and I use these tools every day. As such, ENW participants are asked to bring in negotiation challenges they face, so they can work on them. In other words, they apply the tools as they learn them. If the tools don't work in practice, who needs them?"

Diamond has consulted on negotiations and strategy to the governments of many developing nations, as well as to startups, Fortune 500 firms, and enterprises in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and Asia. Diamond is an entrepreneur, leading such business ventures as Global Strategy Group, i-Luxury.com, and management/capital groups with interests around the globe. Currently, he is involved in a joint venture with Sarnoff to bring digital cinema technology to theaters. He has an MBA from Wharton and a law degree from Harvard.

Diamond is reluctant to elaborate on — in print — specific negotiations because of confidentiality issues. But whether he finds himself facing off with foreign governments, business counterparts, shopkeepers, armed soldiers in Africa, or even less-conventional negotiating partners, he finds the "process of persuasion" to be infinitely alluring. "Every negotiation is a satisfying process," he said. "The facts may change, but the process never changes. I have an intense interest in learning what makes other people tick. Every problem is a puzzle that's a wonder to solve, whether I'm dealing with the dry cleaner or a foreign minister," he said.

Over the years, Diamond has come to appreciate his varied professional experiences. "It's given me more information sets with which to draw upon to find effective solutions. It's helped me become more creative. I find that my work in Bolivia (convincing farmers to grow bananas rather than cocaine) helped me in my work in Canada, which helped me look at the situation in the Ukraine in a new light." In the classroom, he urges his students to "look more broadly at solutions. I don't feel it's enough that my students get a result: I want them to get the best result by developing ever-better processes," Diamond said.

"It's important to be constantly collecting information, to learn as much as you can about the other person," he said. "I don't agree with a lot of the books on negotiations that say negotiators have to be focused mostly on their own positions. Ultimately, the best negotiators are the ones who understand what's going on in the other person's head." This particularly helps in dealing with people who are from different cultures.

So what makes Diamond tick? He's quick, with the answer. "I became a negotiator because when I was a teenager I was everybody's patsy. I just learned over the years how to be more effective at figuring out what makes other people tick, what their hot buttons are. If I can become a good negotiator, anybody can."

   

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