Agriculture Executive Training

Mark January 15 and 16 on your calendar for the University of Minnesota/AgStar Agriculture Executive Training Session: Negotiation

Availability of corn is becoming an important issue for large producers. Perhaps your contract producers would agree to provide the corn for the pigs they care for – but at what cost? People generally see two ways to negotiate: soft or hard. The soft negotiator wants to avoid personal conflict and so makes concessions too quickly to reach agreement. The hard negotiator sees any such situation as a contest of wills and want to win; yet he often ends up producing an equally hard response with the other party.

Effective negotiation is a process through which value can be created and the counterparts can feel as if they have won or done well.  Overall, you enhance the quality of the relationships setting the tone for future interactions.

The main objective of our upcoming workshop is to provide you with the opportunity to enhance your ability to undertake successful negotiations. The process to accomplish this objective is “hands-on learning”. We will conduct several negotiation exercises, and discuss the results. The focus of the discussions will be on what happened and why, and on what can be done to ensure favorable outcomes in future negotiations.

Dr. Glen Whyte from the University of Toronto will lead the session. Dr. White is the Associate Dean, Curriculum at U of T. He also holds the CCMF Chair in Integrative Thinkin is a professor of organizational behaviour and Executive Director of the MBA program at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

A lawyer, Professor Whyte holds an MBA from U of T, and an M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in organizational behaviour from the School of Management, Yale University.  He has earned several awards for teaching and research, including the Graduate Business Council Award as best professor teaching in the second-year MBA Program, Professor Whyte is an expert in negotiation, decision making, risk management, and dispute resolution and has extensive consulting experience in both private and public sector organizations.

We will be staying at Minnesota’s renowned Saint Paul Hotel. This hotel is consistently ranked among the country’s top hotels and is famous for its legendary service to visitors to Saint Paul. The sessions will be held at the Landmark Center, which is the historic federal courts building across the street from the hotel.

Plan to attend this workshop January 15 and 16 and combine it with your Pork Congress attendance.