James Sebenius

James Sebenius

James Sebenius
James K. Sebenius specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. He holds the Gordon Donaldson Professorship of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In 1993, he took the lead in the School's decision--unique among major business schools--to make negotiation a required course in the MBA Program and to create a Negotiation Unit (department) which he headed for several years. The Negotiation Unit grew to several full-time negotiation faculty teaching the required course to over 800 students per year as well as offering advanced dealmaking and negotiation courses to MBAs, doctoral students, and executives. The Negotiation Unit subsequently merged with the School's Organization and Markets Unit to form a new Unit, "Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets (NOM)."

Formerly on the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Sebenius also currently serves as Vice Chair and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. At PON, he chairs the University's annual Great Negotiator Award program, which has intensively engaged with negotiators such as Richard Holbrooke, Lakdhar Brahimi, George Mitchell, and Bruce Wasserstein. He also co-directs a project (with Nick Burns and Bob Mnookin) to extensively interview all former U.S. Secretaries of State—as of January 2017, including James Baker, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice—about their most challenging negotiations.