Draft:Negotiation Bootcamp

Negotiation Bootcamp was a business education class created in Paris, France in 1986 by Gregory A. Miezelis (1948-2011) a corporate educator from Covina, California and economist Dr. Leslie J. Shaw, former Supplier Account Manager at the Electricity Supply Board for their corporate clients. The class was subsequently included in the executive education portfolio of the EAP European School of Management.

In 1990 Dr. Shaw presented the Negotiation Bootcamp to a group of 30 senior HR and operational executives at the Alcatel-Alsthom (now Alcatel-Lucent) group. Following this meeting he delivered a 2-day pilot session to a group of 12 Vice Presidents and C-level executives. With the approval of Chairman and CEO Pierre Suard, Negotiation Bootcamp was then rolled out to over 200 executives from Alcatel CIT, Alcatel Cable (now Alcatel Submarine Networks) and Cegelec. From 1995 to 2000 Negotiation Bootcamp was delivered on and off campus to EAP corporate clients including General Electric, Dassault Aviation, Aérospatiale, Total, Fromageries Bel, BP, Pfizer, Snecma, EDF-GDF, Hewlett-Packard, Thompson-CSF, Seagate and Case Agriculture as well as companies in the Alcatel-Alsthom group. By 2000 the module accounted for 50% of EAP executive education revenue. Flagship customized projects included training the DCN International (now Naval Group) team who negotiated the creation of an IJVC with GEC Marconi (UK) and Orrizonte (Italy) for the development of the Horizon-class Frigate, a new generation of stealth air-defence destroyer and training the Matra Défense (now Matra BAe Dynamics) sales and engineering team who negotiated a contract with a Gulf state for the supply and installation of a surface-to-air missile system.

Following the merger of EAP and ESCP in 2000, Negotiation Bootcamp was rolled out to students in the MBA and Master’s in Management programs. From one class of 16 students per semester in 2000/2001 numbers grew steadily and by 2018/19 had reached over 300 per year. In order to meet the surge in demand, Mel Fearon joined the Negotiation Bootcamp team in 2007, followed in 2009 by Constantin Bjerke and Kieran Loughney in 2011. Negotiation Bootcamp became the most popular class at ESCP Business School with an average satisfaction rating of 89% compared to the faculty average of 74%.

From 2010 to 2014 Negotiation Bootcamp was delivered to visiting groups from McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin with a satisfaction rating of 86%. In 2012/13/14 Negotiation Bootcamp was delivered to 3 groups of 50 senior executives from the IMI International Executive MBA at IMI New Delhi with a satisfaction rating of 97%. Negotiation Bootcamp was also delivered by Mel Fearon in business and engineering schools and universities in the Paris region with consistently high satisfaction ratings.

At the request of EABIS (European Academy of Business in Society) Shaw wrote an article describing Negotiation Bootcamp - Experiential Learning in the Global Classroom - that was published in the International Journal of Management in Education on July 22, 2009 (Vol. 3, Nos. 3/4, pp. 282-90). On November 25, 2010 Shaw presented the experiential learning method used in Negotiation Bootcamp at the EABIS Experiential Learning Congress hosted by ESMT Berlin and supported by Agentur Mehrwert and Robert Bosch Stiftung.

Other academic papers associated with Negotiation Bootcamp presented by Dr. Shaw included Negotiation Strategy and Aristotle’s Rhetoric (2^nd Paris Biennial on Negotiation, 2005), Positional Bargaining Revisited (4^th Paris Biennial on Negotiation, 2011), Automated Negotiation (5^th Paris Biennial on Negotiation, 2014) and Physical Violence as a Negotiating Tactic and the Criminalisation of C-level Executives (6^th Paris Biennial on Negotiation, 2016).

Negotiation Bootcamp became a subject of controversy at ESCP Business School (then known as ESCP Europe) in June 2016 when at a meeting of the European Teaching and Learning Committee it was decided to reduce the number of groups taking the class each year from 8 to 2. The rationale for this move was that Negotiation Bootcamp was attracting such large numbers that other electives were left with few or even no students. Two student petitions were launched to protest this decision, one in French and one in English. The petitions garnered over 2,500 signatures and the decision was not implemented.

Negotiation Bootcamp was delivered for the last time by Dr. Shaw in two simultaneous sessions at ESCP Business School in June 2023 to 43 students from the Master's in Management apprenticeship track. The student satisfaction rating was 95%.