About Professor Wheeler
MBA Class of 1952 Professor of Management Practice
Michael Wheeler holds the MBA Class of 1952 Professor of Management Practice
at the Harvard Business School where teaches both Complex Negotiation and The
Moral Leader, as well as a variety of executive courses. In recent years he
served as faculty chair of the first year MBA program and headed the required
Negotiation course. He has also taught Leadership, Values, and Decision Making,
and, as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Mediation & Consensus
Building.
Wheeler’s current research focuses on negotiation dynamics, dispute
resolution, organizational design, and ethics. He is the editor of the
Negotiation Journal and co-director of the Negotiation Pedagogy
initiative at the inter-university Program on Negotiation.
Wheeler is the author or co-author of nine books, including most recently,
What’s Fair? Ethics for Negotiators (with Carrie Menkel-Meadow),
Business Fundamentals in Negotiation, and On Teaching
Negotiation. His text Environmental Dispute Resolution (with
Lawrence Bacow) won the CPR-ADR’s annual award as the best book on negotiation.
He has written numerous articles in both scholarly journals (among them, the
Yale Journal of Regulation, the Harvard Negotiation Law
Review, and The Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies) and the
public press, including The Atlantic Monthly and The New York
Times.
He has also written scores of negotiation exercises, cases, notes, and
self-assessment tools. These materials cover subjects ranging from nonverbal
communication and complexity theory, to the parallels between negotiation
strategy and both jazz and war-fighting. He has written extensive case studies
of negotiation system design, documenting GE’s “early dispute resolution
initiative” and Guinness’s process for approving acquisitions and joint
ventures. With colleagues Gerald Zaltman and Kimberlyn Leary, he is
investigating emotions and unconscious attitudes that people bring to the
bargaining table. With Clark Freshman he is also exploring nonverbal
communication and lie detection in negotiation.
Wheeler taught at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 1981 to
1993, where he was Director of Research at MIT's Center for Real Estate
Development. Previously he was Director of Education and Research at the Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy and Professor of Law at New England Law School. He has
also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Colorado and the Politecnico
di Torino, Italy. He has appeared extensively on public television in Boston and
elsewhere.
He holds degrees from Amherst College, Boston University, and Harvard Law
School, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1969. He has been a
panelist for the American Arbitration Association, and has served as a mediator
or arbitrator in a variety of business and regulatory disputes. He has advised
corporate clients, trade organizations, and government agencies on negotiation
issues in the United States and abroad.
