Catherine Tinsley comments on negotiation lessons to be learned from the Trump-Kim meetings in Singapore

Posted in News

Not even Nostradamus could have predicted this one. As US President, Donald Trump, and North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, put down their yo-yos and finally meet face-to-face after months of will-they-won’t-they speculation, the world will be treated to a live case study in the ‘art of the deal’. Or so we hope. When the clock chimes 9am local time in Singapore, on Tuesday 12th June, the two leaders will be sitting down, each with their own agenda. President Trump wants complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. From the North Korean side, the end goal has been less lucid, but denuclearization would have to be accompanied with a security guarantee, and a ‘new relationship with the US’. In anticipation of the Trump-Kim summit, BusinessBecause caught up with professors from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, to talk about the lessons MBA students can learn about negotiation from watching the two leaders.

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Cathy Tinsley, professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, agrees. “Negotiations are best served if the negotiator and their team do a lot of preparation ahead of time,” she says. It’s also good to change up the players, she adds. “I think the fact that this is taking place in the context of several failed negotiations [by past Presidents] shows that all negotiations have linkage effects.”