A standing inter-university consortium based at Harvard Law School, with faculty, research, publications and executive courses. Negotiation is treated as an academic discipline with an institution attached.
education
The calculation path
The calculation path. In German schools the Rechenweg is marked, not only the answer. A correct result with no working shown earns little or nothing, and a wrong result reached by sound method earns partial credit.
Every German adult sat through years of this. The habit of asking how you got there is taught before the age of ten.
The doctorate in business
Doctorates are notably common in German senior management, particularly in engineering, chemistry and law, and the title appears on the business card and in the email signature. In the German case the doctorate is read as depth in a subject rather than as a credential for leadership.
Getting to Yes
Fisher and Ury published it in 1981, out of the Harvard Negotiation Project. It has sold millions of copies and its vocabulary — interests not positions, BATNA, objective criteria — is now ordinary American business language. A method for reaching agreement became a mass-market American bestseller.
Rotational programs
American graduate schemes move participants through several functions in two or three years — finance, operations, marketing, supply chain. The design assumes breadth is the preparation for seniority.
Examined by the trade
The journeyman and master examinations — Gesellenprüfung and Meisterprüfung — are taken before a chamber committee, not before the employer, and both have written, practical and oral parts. The assessment of competence is removed from the workplace entirely and given to the trade.
The stretch assignment
American development practice deliberately places people in roles beyond their current competence, on the argument that the growth happens there. Being underprepared is treated as the point rather than as a risk.
Closing techniques
American sales training names and teaches them: the assumptive close, the alternative close, the urgency close, the takeaway. That the techniques have names means they are taught, practised and expected on both sides of the table.
The master decides
A German Meister is trained and examined in the trade and then exercises judgment within it — which materials, which method, when to stop. The qualification is the licence to depart from the obvious procedure.
Years in the field
German job advertisements specify years of Berufserfahrung in the relevant field, and it is what the culture treats as the source of judgment. Discretion is granted to people who have been formed, not to people who are clever.