MLDP Recap: Escaping the Dark Side of the Moon!

Read a student's account of our most recent session in our Management Leadership and Development program below. For more information about MLDP, click here.

The seventh session of MLDP this term featured a lecture from Professor John Garvey the Director of the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. Prior to the session, we were assigned a reading—an excerpt from Getting Past NO! by William Ury. Professor Garvey supplied us with handouts over the course of the session on which we took notes. One was a sheet that stated "The Six Stages of Negotiation," which outlined all the steps of effective negotiation that Prof. Garvey talked about. I thought this was one of the most beneficial and memorable parts of the session because it's something that we can always review after the session in order to reaffirm the lessons that we learned.

To exercise the skills of negotiation we learned during the session, we engaged in a "NASA Survival Negotiation Scenario," explained by Thanh Nguyen via Prezi Presentation. The presentation was engaging and I found it to be a great way to familiarize us with the scenario of the activity that would follow. We were divided into groups and the activity required us to imagine that our groups had crashed "on the dark side of the moon." After pairing each group with another group, the activity dictated that in order to survive, we needed to negotiate which group would hike to the illuminated side of the moon to find help, which group would stay and wait, and which group would get to take which objects from a list of 15 items.

I believe Professor John Garvey taught us a valuable skillset that can be applied in our lives no matter what paths we take through Dartmouth and beyond.

--Written by Shani Brown ‘14, MLDP Winter ‘14 Participant