Michael Wheeler

Author, professor, and mediator

Michael Wheeler is an authority on negotiation theory and practice. A Harvard Business School professor since 1993, he has taught negotiation and leadership to thousands of MBA and executive program participants. He currently co-chairs the Strategic Negotiation executive course and is collaborating with HBS’s Baker Library to create Negotiate 1-2-3, an on-line, multi-media resource.

 

In 1999 Wheeler was appointed to the chair endowed by the HBS Class of 1952. At HBS he has received the Greenhill Award for his contributions to the School’s mission, and in 2015 he was named a Senior Fellow. He has also taught at Harvard Law School, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, MIT, and New England Law.

Wheeler has also been a leading figure at the world-famous Program on Negotiation, the inter-university consortium based at the Harvard Law School. He served as editor-in-chief of its Negotiation Journal from 1995 to 2015 and was recently named Editor Emeritus.

In addition, he is the author (or co-author) of ten books, including his latest,The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World, Among his other books are, 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.

Selected Works

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 Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. He has recently been featured in The Financial Times and the Washington Post. He also has appeared extensively on television nationwide. His posts on LinkedIn’s Influencer platform have gathered more than a million views.

Wheeler currently serves on the International Steering Committee of the Afghanistan Center for Dispute Resolution in Kabul. He is also on the Advisory Councils of both the Moscow-based Advisory Council of the Center for Mediation and Law, and the ADR-Center in Rome. He was a founding board member in 1993 of the Consensus Building Institute, a not-for-profit organization that facilitates resolution of public policy disputes throughout the world. He served as CBI’s Chair from 2009 to 2013, and now leads its educational initiatives.

Affiliations

Wheeler has been a panelist for the American Arbitration Association, and has served as both a mediator and an 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

Wheeler holds degrees from Amherst College, Boston University, and Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1969.