We are excited to highlight Professor Seth Freeman, who teaches Conflict, Collaboration, and Negotiation for the MS in Organizational Management and Strategy (MSOMS) program this year. Professor Freeman brings a breadth of knowledge, his own research, and industry experience to the classroom, where he tailors his teaching to meet the needs, interests, and backgrounds of his students.
MSOMS Professor Seth Freeman
Can you tell us about your academic and professional background?
I am a professor of negotiation and conflict management at Stern. I also teach at other institutions, including Columbia University and GEC Academy in China, and have an active training and consulting practice. I’m the author of 15 Tools to Turn the Tide: A Step-by-Step Playbook for Empowered Negotiating. I have a degree in economics from Cornell and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. I practiced corporate law for six years with large New York firms before beginning my academic work. Both of my daughters were born in China.
Tell us a bit about your course. Are there any overarching principles you hope to convey to the students?
Yes, there were three key ideas I want students to take away: one is that there are specific ways to ‘win warmly’ and in the process to be hard on the problem and soft on the person. This approach can foster more peace, prosperity, and harmony for everyone and help you serve your firm or family particularly well. Second is that two keys to success are skilled preparation and listening.
But perhaps most important is that negotiation and conflict management are learnable skills and that simple tools can help you learn, remember, use those skills when you really most need them. If I were to sum up the whole course in just three words it would be this: with these skills and tools, students can become more strong and kind. What could be better?
How is this course impacted by your own research or background?
Curiously, although my legal training gave me a rich ability to think critically and engage with scholarly work, I’ve been surprised that most lawyers aren’t particularly skilled at negotiating or managing conflict! So I’ve had to look beyond my original field. I’ve read widely, watched skilled conflict managers, and negotiators in action, interviewed them, trained to be a volunteer mediator, and researched two books on the subjects. I’ve drawn on psychology, politics, history, economics, social science, research, and studies of practitioners. I’ve found that no one field or expert has a monopoly on wisdom in this remarkable subject. As I often say, I’m only interested in it 10 hours a day. There’s so much to learn.
The good news is that even a tiny bit of this work is enough to help anyone manage conflict and negotiation much better. For example, each semester, I ask my students to go teach someone else to negotiate. Even after just three or four classes, I have found my students are very good teachers. I call their students my ‘grandstudents’. In just 45 minutes, many of my students are able to train my grandstudents to do markedly better with real life conflicts and negotiations. That means the content itself is powerful.
How do you integrate western and eastern perspectives into the course curriculum given the joint nature between Stern and NYU Shanghai of the MSOMS program?
Surprisingly, neither Western nor Eastern students naturally know foundational principles of negotiation and conflict management. Equally surprisingly, I have found after having taught students in America and China many, many times that students in both countries find the principles are readily understandable and applicable.
Not that every idea can be applied in exactly the same way in the two cultures. For example, America tends to be what’s called a low context culture, meaning Americans tend to be pretty direct and less able to pick up nuance. So they may need to learn to slow down, listen more, and reframe their statements so they understand the other better and are more winsome and less blunt. Meanwhile, Chinese culture tends to be a high context culture, meaning Chinese may need to anticipate American directness and infer less. To the point: once, teaching for the fourth time in China, I asked my host out of curiosity why I was staying in a new hotel. To my surprise, she had my bags moved to the old hotel. She inferred something I hadn’t meant to say!
There’s also some truth to the observation that Chinese tend to be more focused on long-term relationships and flexibility, while Americans tend to be more focused on the current transaction and honoring the contract. There have been famous misunderstandings that arise from these differences. But they can also be exaggerated. Microsoft and Pepsi, for example, spent 20 years in China before either began to make a profit. And I’ve seen Chinese executives close a $10M investment deal over dinner. So one has to be careful not to overstate differences.
There can also be some ethical differences, like when is it OK to bluff? Some Chinese business traditions include a fondness for ‘stratagems,’ and some American business traditions include a fondness for a ‘poker’ approach. But here too individuals from each culture can have different views, and many from both cultures dislike these tactics.
I’ve found that students in each culture are very good at adapting the principles to their specific situations. Part of the purpose of this course and program is to help them understand and navigate different cultures and contexts. In one class, students directly experience culture shock in a fun, surprising way, then explore ways to cope with cultural differences in negotiation.
Professor Freeman in the front of the classroom with the MSOMS students
How is your teaching tailored to pre-experience (students straight out of undergrad without work experience) Master’s students to help them achieve the learning objectives?
In a word: variety. The course includes a mixture of simulations, exercises, discussion, lecture, and demonstrations. Students with no work experience enjoy getting a lot of experience in the class itself. Students with work experience enjoy bringing their histories into the simulations and discussion. But the difference may be less pronounced than one might first expect. Even if a student has worked for a few years, they may have drawn more questions than answers, and they may have picked up a curious mix of good and bad practices. Often the course helps them know what to keep, what to drop, and what to add. I find seasoned veterans and completely inexperienced students enjoy the course equally, and gain a lot from it; new students learn a lot, and veterans refine and build on their basic skills.
What were your impressions of the MSOMS students?
The MSOMS students were remarkable in some ways and I’ve taught many different groups of students of different ages, backgrounds, and programs. As far as the simulations themselves went, the students often did as well as - or better than - any other group I’ve worked with. I was so pleased I wrote the heads of the program after Day 1 to celebrate their performance.
Are there other highlights of the course you want to share (i.e. group projects, case discussion, guest speakers, company visits)?
Not only do students negotiate with each other several times during the course; some negotiate with me. In two or three sessions, we do an activity called a fishbowl exercise, where I assume the role of a challenging counterpart, and one or more students negotiate with me while the others watch and take notes. Students usually enjoy it very much. It’s exciting and stressful, which is valuable, precisely because negotiation itself can be stressful. In fact, hostage negotiators routinely use fishbowls to train.
For most students, the simulations – including the fishbowls – are the true highlights of the course. I’m a firm believer in active learning in general and simulation in particular. They have the ability to make learning more fun, memorable, and exciting than just about anything else can.