Biography
BIOGRAPHY of HERB COHEN
For more than three decades, Herb Cohen has been a
practicing negotiator, intimately enmeshed in some of the world’s headline
dramas from hostile takeovers to hostage negotiations. His clients have included
business executives, entrepreneurs, sports and theatrical agents plus large
corporations – as well as governmental agencies, such as the Department of
State, FBI, CIA, The US Conference of Mayors and US Department of Justice.
Unlike some theorists, he was actively involved in the negotiations that settled
the NFL players’ strike and the General Motors Chevy mobile litigation and also
participated in the START Arms Control Negotiations with the Soviet Union.
He started formally teaching the subject of negotiations during a two week
course for attorneys in 1963 sponsored by Allstate Insurance Company. It was
then he first used the terms “Win-Win. Win-Lose, Lose-Lose”.
Herb Cohen’s analysis, insights and humorous view of many of these high-level
happenings have appeared in many international publications, and he himself has
been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, People, The Economist, The New
Yorker, Esquire, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and
even Playboy Magazine.
He is the author of You Can Negotiate Anything
which was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost one year and has
been translated into thirty languages. His latest book,
Negotiate This! By Caring But Not T-H-A-T Much was
published in mid-September 2003.
During the Cold War, Herb Cohen served with the U.S. Army, 14th Armored Cavalry
Regiment on the East-West Border in Bad Kissingen, Germany.
While attending university and law school he worked in many business and
governmental organizations and ultimately became a faculty member at the
University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Business. Since then he has lectured
at many educational institutions and enterprises such as The Harvard Negotiating
Project, Yale Law School, The Kellogg School, Wharton, the University of
Wisconsin, the University of California-San Diego, McGill University, UBC and
the Columbia and Chicago University School of Business.
