This exercise provides students with an engaging two-person negotiation between an employer and a job candidate over the details of a sales role with The Peak, a small but rapidly growing news-media start-up in Canada. The Peak’s co-founder and chief executive officer wants a new salesperson who is willing to take on responsibilities outside the scope of a typical salesperson and to work with little supervision. The candidate is a seasoned professional with an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to join a small start-up, where she can take more ownership over her work and liaise with the co-founders to grow the company. By role-playing as the employer or the candidate, students will determine how best to achieve satisfactory job-offer terms.
This negotiating exercise is set at the time of the 2020 round of collective bargaining between the National Football League (NFL) owners and representatives from the NFL Players Association. The six parties at the bargaining table (three representatives on each side) have interests—both conflicting and compatible—regarding the preferred ultimate outcomes as well as a strained previous relationship, which serves to complicate the bargaining process.
In 1989, Tracy Edwards, at age 26, led the first all-female crew in the prestigious and grueling 59,264-kilometre (32,000 nautical mile) Whitbread Round the World Race. Edwards had developed a deep love for sailing in general and for the Whitbread Round the World Race in particular. However, she soon found that it was impossible, as a woman, to participate as a fully integrated member of a crew. Hence, she sought to organize an all-female team to compete in the race. She located, bought, and restored an old racing yacht, which eventually was christened Maiden. The idea of a team of women racing in the Whitbread Round the World Race was unthinkable to many men in and around the world of yacht racing, so the backlash was predictable and intense, and the hurdles to successfully complete the race seemed insurmountable. This six-part case series chronicles the myriad challenges faced by Edwards and her colleagues before and during the race, including rampant sexism and misogyny. Each of the six cases sets the stage for the next challenge Edwards has to overcome.
In 2018, Software development corporation iQmetrix Software Development Corp. (iQmetrix), headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, had experienced exponential growth and success over the past two decades. The company’s head of People and Culture, was interested in the debate over the ideal performance appraisal process. After reading a few articles in the Harvard Business Review, she was considering dropping traditional performance appraisals and replacing them with written feedback only. To make an informed decision, she conducted a quasi-experiment by assigning employees to different performance evaluation conditions and then examined employee perceptions six months later to determine which evaluation format she should adopt company-wide.