Wharton MBA for Executives

I think Negotiations is the best class at Wharton. It’s certainly a lot of fun since you do a lot of hands on negotiations with classmates. However, it is a class where you really see the true colors of a lot of classmates (mostly bad).

As much as I tried to take the class and the negotiations seriously to learn something in the class, it was very tough for me since I knew it was just a class exercise. I found out that I’m really not very good at focusing on something if I know that it’s not real. As as result, I didn’t really care that much about the negotiations and had fun during most of them rather than get worked up and stressed out.

In negotiations in both real life and this class, there is generally some area of overlap where compromise is possible. It’s really up to the negotiators to figure out how large the area of overlap is and then work to more or less give each other some surplus. Most will disagree with me but that’s essentially how I viewed the class. I did not try to take as much as I can. Even in a “real life” negotiation I rarely try to completely take advantage of the other party (unless he/she deserves it). For example, when I buy a car, I try to get a few hundred dollars over invoice price while I know there are others who get cars at invoice or below invoice. For me, it’s really not about trying to squeeze as much as possible…it’s about getting a great deal for me and good deal for the opponent. Shocker…maybe I don’t have the personality for a Wharton MBA after all.

So it did annoy me and irk me a bit when I had to go up against students who were unbelievably aggressive. The funny thing is that some students actually are crazy when it comes to this stuff. There was literally cursing, yelling, etc…over some of these exercises.

In the end, I would recommend that this class be taken P/NP. Since a big portion of the grade is determined by your performance in the negotiations (compare with other students in your same role), it can get overly competitive. I don’t like taking classes P/NP but I really should have in this case considering my personality.

But still, I will say that this was the best class at Wharton and I highly recommend it to future students. I will even say that if you graduate from Wharton not having taken this class, you really did miss out.

Professor Schweitzer is hilarious in his own way.