UC Davis MBA course review: MGB246 Negotiation in Organizations with Barry Miller

UC Davis Working Professional (Bay Area) MBA course review

MGB 246: Negotiation in Organizations with Barry Miller

Date evaluated: Fall 2009 at the Bay Area Working Professional San Ramon campus.

Official course description: This course is designed to help students develop the ability to effectively negotiate in a competitive business environment. It focuses on negotiation skill-building in the areas of individual conflict management, team management, performance appraisal, corporate impression management and inter-organizational project management. The course will be taught largely through in-class simulations to provide an opportunity for experiential learning. The simulations will also allow students to develop a personal style of negotiation by discovering what works best for them in different situations.

The real course description: Analysis of negotiation skills. Negotiation exercises. A lot of insightful journal-keeping and analysis of personal negotiation events.

The professor: Barry has a warm personality and was generally a passive observer of our exercises. Much of his feedback was about the grammatical content of the journals we kept, and I felt like I would have liked a little more thorough examination of negotiation strategies. While we dissected several negotiations and examined the individual components, weighted the value attributed to them by each party, and discussed the cases, we were not as thorough as I would have liked.

I was hoping that the negotiation exercises we did in class would have had more post-exercise analysis applied to them. I think it would have been valuable to identify the tactics that worked, and to figure out how to overcome some of the stumbling blocks that some groups found themselves trapped by.

The grade: I got an A. I give Barry and the class an A-.