How We Help

CBI helps individuals, teams, and businesses around the world to negotiate consistently higher value agreements.

Why CBI?

For fifteen years CBI has applied a robust analytical theory of value creation to some of the worlds toughest disputes and negotiations. Unlike most training firms, we have actively mediated national and international disputes where stakes and complexity are high. We are able to bring that experience to bear on the problems our clients face. Unlike most consulting firms, we have trained thousands of executives from all over the world and understand how to assess and diagnose the learning opportunities that each group brings.

Who We Serve

CBI works with organizations of all kinds to improve their negotiating capacity—from Fortune 25 companies, to state and federal agencies, to NGOs and community groups.  Our goal is always the same: to help the organization negotiate higher value agreements while preserving relationships and reputations. View a list of our current and past clients.

Our Services

CBI helps leaders, communities, organizations, and governments worldwide find better ways to work together on important public issues. We offer in-depth knowledge of group dynamics, multiparty negotiations, and intercultural interaction. Using mediation, facilitation, and a range of specialized tools we have developed for assessment, evaluation, process design, we help our clients integrate thought and action to achieve wiser, more stable, and fairer results.

Assessment

Our confidential negotiations audit can identify specific challenges your negotiators are facing, and provide specific recommendations for learning and development.

Coaching and Consulting

Access world class coaching and advice, and develop your organization’s internal negotiation coaching capabilities.

Organizational Development

We help organizations to support negotiators and align incentives, so that new skills and practices produce real results.

Tailored Training

Our tailored workshops address your negotiation challenges, combining a robust model with context-specific materials.

Tailored Courses

Building A World Class Negotiating Organization

Organizations that want to achieve sustainable improvements in their negotiations must understand how to align existing organizational processes, structures, and incentives with an approach that can create value while protecting relationships.
CBI Practititoners: Hal Movius, Lawrence Susskind
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Collaborating in Competitive Environments

Using simulations, video, and cases, this course focuses on the skills and insight required to sustain collaboration in environments where revenues and margins often overwhelm other corporate values, and where internal negotiations are often as difficult as external ones.
CBI Practititoners: Hal Movius
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Collaborative Leadership

As organizations become flatter and problems become more complex, technical knowledge and the power to execute effectively are often distributed among many individuals or groups. In such an environment, leaders need new ways of involving employees in the decision-making process to achieve better decisions that can be implemented with greater employee commitment.
CBI Practititoners: Hal Movius
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Dealing With an Angry Public

The Consensus Building Institute offers a new approach to public relations and crisis management that builds on a proven approach outlined in the award-winning book, Dealing With an Angry Public, by Lawrence Susskind and Patrick Field.
CBI Practititoners: Hal Movius, Patrick Field
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Managing Conflict Inside the Organization

Organizations today incur enormous costs because of conflict within their own walls. Conflicts can erupt – or fester for years, draining resources and morale – because of incompatible goals, differing assumptions and perceptions, and varying values and incentives.
CBI Practititoners: Hal Movius, Joshua Gordon
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Negotiating Effective Regulatory Agreements

Do you face skeptical regulators across the negotiating table? Are you confronted with regulators (or, as regulators, with companies and other stakeholders) who just won’t take “no” for an answer?
CBI Practititoners: Joshua Gordon, Patrick Field
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Negotiating Partnerships for Sustainable Development

This course uses the Mutual Gains Approach and CBI’s consensus building expertise to teach methods for integrating economic, environmental and social goals, managing trade-offs, and leveraging relationships to produce and sustain joint gains. 

CBI Practititoners: Patrick Field, Merrick Hoben
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Negotiation Training for Managers, Executives, and Specialists

To achieve higher value agreements while protecting and enhancing relationships, leaders must be able to negotiate effectively with both external and internal partners.
CBI Practititoners: Hal Movius
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The Art and Artifice of Public Apology

Using real-world case examples, exercises, videos, and reflections this course focuses on helping government and corporate leaders to understand when to apologize, when not to, and how to do so in ways that build credibility and protect relationships.
CBI Practititoners: Patrick Field, Joshua Gordon
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Business Case Studies

Advanced Negotiation Skill Training with Capital One

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CBI has developed a customized 3-day “Negotiation & Influence Skills” curriculum for Capital One’s senior executives and middle management.

CBI Practitioners
Hal Movius, Patrick Field

American Cancer Society Train-the-Trainers

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An initial one-day course catalyzed an organization-wide commitment to build the negotiation skills of all American Cancer Society staff and volunteers. With training and ongoing support from CBI, a team of ACS trainers is now providing their own negotiation skills workshops throughout the organization and around the country.

Clients
American Cancer Society
CBI Practitioners
Lawrence Susskind, David Fairman, Michele Ferenz

Fortune 25 Global Technology Company

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CBI helped the organization to build capacity across its business groups on a global scale, setting the stage for improved knowledge management systems that will help negotiators to achieve consistently better results in mission-critical business negotiations.

CBI Practitioners
Hal Movius, David Kovick

“Joint Training” for McDonald's Company and Franchisee Leaders

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Each year since 2004, CBI has provided training in the Mutual Gains Approach to Negotiation (MGA) to leaders across McDonald’s U.S. Regions. Although corporate and franchisee interests are often well aligned, in some cases their interests differ, and conflicts sometimes arise in implementing new operational initiatives.
CBI Practitioners
Hal Movius

Training Senior Leaders Across the WPP Network

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WPP Group, a company made up of over 300 marketing media and marketing agencies, found itself under increasing pressures from clients and their procurement consultants. Based on confidential interviews with top executives, CBI initially provided a careful assessment current practices and opportunities for improvement. We then created a two-day tailored workshop that was given a dozen times globally to over 500 top executives from across the agencies. In addition, we helped an internal coaching team inside WPP to develop its own training and coaching capabilities, reaching more than a thousand additional managers. Thanks to CBI’s intervention, WPP negotiators have reported not only increased confidence and satisfaction with the negotiation process but also increased ROI:  from five cases alone, savings of close to a million dollars were attributed to new learning.
CBI Practitioners
Hal Movius, Lawrence Susskind, Guhan Subramanian