James K. Sebenius

James K. Sebenius is an American economist, currently the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School as well as co-founder and partner of Lax Sebenius LLC, specializes in analyzing and advising corporations and governments worldwide on their most complex and challenging negotiations.[1]

Formerly on the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Sebenius also currently serves as Vice-Chair and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School.[2] At PON, he chairs the University's annual Great Negotiator Award program, which has recognized negotiators such as Richard Holbrooke, Lakdhar Brahimi, George Mitchell, and Bruce Wasserstein. He also co-directs a project to extensively interview all former U.S. Secretaries of State— including James Baker, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and John Kerry—about their most challenging negotiations.[3]

Sebenius is the author or co-author or editor of five books including 3D Negotiation (Harvard Business School Press), The Manager as Negotiator (Free Press), and, most recently, Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level (HarperCollins). Together with these books, his published output includes more than 250 items including articles, case studies, and negotiation simulations.[4]

Most recently, his academic work has centered on the role of social media in shaping the theory and practice of negotiation.[5] In May 2020, he co-chaired a Program on Negotiation conference on AI, Technology, and Negotiation, where he presented a panel discussion on "The Potentially Critical Roles of Social Media in Negotiation."[6] In 2021, Sebenius published an article in the Negotiation Journal on "Dealmaking Disrupted: The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation",[7] and along with co-authors Ben Cook, David Lax and Paul Levy he published a Harvard Business Review article outlining a "Playbook for Negotiators in the Social Media Era."[8]

He holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from Vanderbilt in mathematics, an M.S. from Stanford’s Engineering School, and a Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard. He is married to Nancy Buck; their children are Zander, Alyza, and Isaac.