James Sebenius holds the first Gordon Donaldson Professorship of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. Formerly an Associate Professor at f the Kennedy School of Government, Dr. Sebenius currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School; he has led the University's annual Great Negotiator Award program, which has worked to bring negotiators such as George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke to campus. In addition, he currently directs the Negotiation Roundtable, which he co-founded in 1982 to extract the most valuable lessons from hundreds of varied negotiations. Dr. Sebenius is also a founder and principal of Lax Sebenius: The Negotiation Group LLC, a firm that provides negotiation advisory services to corporations and governments worldwide.
In 1993, Dr. Sebenius took the lead in the Business School's decision to make negotiation a required course in the MBA Program and to create a Negotiation Unit, which he headed for several years. This unit has now merged with the School’s Organization and Markets Unit to form a new Unit, Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets (NOM).
After leaving Harvard in the mid-1980s, Dr. Sebenius worked initially as vice president at the Blackstone Group and later as Special Adviser to the firm. In its first year, Blackstone announced transactions valued at over $11 billion and advised over a dozen major corporate clients. In 1984, Dr. Sebenius was elected a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. From 1976 to 1977, Dr. Sebenius served as assistant to Robert White, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, and from 1977 to 1980 with the State Department on the U.S. Delegation to the Law of the Sea negotiations led by Elliot Richardson.
Dr. Sebenius has written several books including, 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deal, The Manager as Negotiator, both with David Lax., and Negotiating the Law of the Sea. He is a co-editor and author of many works, popular and academic articles as well as field case studies. He also helped develop and served as expert commentator in the video, “Negotiating Corporate Change.”
Dr. Sebenius holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in business economics, a masters degree in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford's Engineering School, and graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University and holds a degree in mathematics and English.
