Understand Why Dispute Resolution Is Important to Business Success

This module is on an especially important topic for business, and that’s dispute resolution. And I say it’s especially important for two reasons. First of all, business leaders in various surveys have indicated how important the topic is. Although, sometimes they talk about specific aspects of dispute resolution, such as class actions. The second reason why it’s so important is that dispute resolution touches every stakeholder. There’s a possibility of a dispute with every key stakeholder. I first became aware of how important dispute resolution is a few years ago when the CEO of Citi Corp, his name was Walter Wriston, invited 10 of us who were representatives from business schools to lunch in New York City.

And we all weren’t sure exactly why he invited us to lunch, but over a long lunch he explained to us how important dispute resolution was to business. And he explained to us that litigation was hurting business tremendously because of the time involved and because of the huge costs. And so, he tried to encourage us to begin offering courses on dispute resolution in our business schools. So we all went back to our campuses, and that’s when I first developed my course on negotiation and dispute resolution. So, very important topic that relates to the survival of a business. Many businesses, according to a recent survey, are involved in bet the company type litigation that can destroy a company.

Now, we’re going to draw the videos for this module from my other MOOC on negotiation. And specifically, we’re going to be looking at these topics. We’re going to start with dispute prevention, and then ADR Concepts and Tools. And then spend some time focusing on the two key building blocks of ADR, which are arbitration and mediation. If you have watched the other MOOC videos, then you can skip this segment. If you haven’t taken the other course, if you’re interested in learning more about the course or taking the negotiation modules, here’s a link to that course. It’s been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and subtitled in French, Ukrainian and Chinese.

And here’s also a link to a negotiation and dispute resolution planning tool. It’s an app I developed called Negotiation Planner. So, if you want to visit that website, you’ll find a number of tools that you can use for dispute resolution.