Playing the Right Game:
Strategic Negotiation for the Global Boardroom
Your team is negotiating with counterparts who are playing a different game. This programme changes three specific things about how they prepare, analyse, and perform — measurable at six months, visible in the next negotiation they walk into.
Why most negotiation training fails your global teams
Standard negotiation training teaches tactics. Tactics are real skills. They are not what is missing. What is missing is the structural analysis that happens before any tactic is deployed — and the cross-cultural payoff modelling that changes what your counterpart is actually optimising for.
Tactics without structure
Frameworks built for a world where everyone optimises for the same things fail when the counterpart is Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. The payoff structure is genuinely different — and tactics applied to an unmodelled game produce poor results regardless of execution quality.
Optimistic BATNA
Teams routinely overestimate their walk-away alternatives. They arrive at high-stakes negotiations with weaker positions than they believe — and the gap between assumed leverage and actual leverage is where value is lost consistently.
Theory without application
When game theory is taught academically — without real cases at genuine stakes — the concepts don’t transfer to the boardroom. Behaviour does not change because the framework never felt like it predicted reality.
What changes — and how you know it has
These are not knowledge objectives. They are behaviour changes — things your people will do differently in the next negotiation they walk into. Each is observable at six months by L&D review.
From positional preparation to game modelling
Participants build a full payoff matrix for both sides before any significant negotiation — not just their own position. They ask “what game is my counterpart actually playing?” before designing their approach.
From optimistic BATNA to honest walk-away power
Participants develop real alternatives 4–6 weeks before key negotiations — not reactively on the day. They complete a written four-step honest BATNA assessment and map the relational walk-away cost alongside the financial.
From cultural courtesy to cultural payoff accuracy
Participants treat mianzi, nemawashi, and kibun as analytical inputs — payoff dimensions that change counterpart decision-making as directly as commercial terms — not as etiquette considerations.
Six landmark negotiations. Every lesson grounded in one.
No hypothetical scenarios. Each case is selected because it makes the game theory visible at the level of genuine strategic stakes — and because it has a cross-cultural dimension that changes the analysis.
Three formats. One curriculum. Built around your team.
Every format delivers the same curriculum, the same capability outcomes, and the same six real cases. Format choice depends on team size, geographic distribution, and how much time you can take from the calendar.
Face-to-Face Intensive
Blended Programme
Online Self-Access
Brendan McMahon has spent 28 years designing and delivering negotiation and leadership programmes across Asia — in boardrooms, classrooms, and executive programmes in Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.
His programmes are distinctive for one reason: they do not separate theory from application. Every framework is built around real cases at real stakes, with the cross-cultural dimension treated as a first-order analytical variable rather than an afterthought. Clients include multinationals with significant Asian operations, regional leadership programmes, and executive MBA cohorts seeking practitioners rather than academics.
What participants say happened six months later
Not what they learned. What they did differently.
“The Samsung-Apple payoff matrix was the moment it clicked. Six years negotiating with Korean suppliers — and this was the first framework that explained their behaviour clearly.”
“What changed for me: I stopped assuming my counterpart was optimising for the same things I was. I spend the first 30 minutes of any serious preparation now just mapping their payoffs. The outcomes have been measurably different.”
“My team came back using language I hadn’t heard from them before — ‘what’s their BATNA,’ ‘what’s the mianzi cost here?’ That transfer of thinking is rare from a training programme.”
From first conversation to delivery in four steps
Corporate commissioning is not a catalogue purchase. We start with a conversation to understand your team, your counterpart contexts, and what a successful outcome looks like — then design accordingly.
Discovery call
30 minutes. Your team’s level, counterpart contexts, desired outcomes, calendar constraints. No pitch — diagnosis first.
Programme design
Confirm format, customise case framing to your industry where relevant, agree pre-programme materials. Typically 5–7 days.
Proposal & contract
Written proposal with objectives, format, schedule, and investment. Simple contract. Deposit to confirm the date.
Delivery
Pre-read distributed 1–2 weeks prior. Optional 90-minute follow-up debrief at six weeks post-programme.
Start with a conversation, not a contract
Tell us about your team and we’ll tell you which format makes sense. A genuine 30-minute diagnostic to see if this is the right programme for your people.
