Hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for spending

time with us today. It's listeners like you in 181 different countries that have made

Negotiate Anything the most popular negotiation and conflict resolution podcast in the world.

I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, professor, and the director of the American Negotiation Institute.

Before we get started, I have two quick questions for you. Is negotiation a critical part of what you do? Do you need to resolve conflict and persuade at work?

If you answered yes to both of those questions, visit our website to learn more about our negotiation workshops.

We've traveled the country working with professionals just like you, and we'd love to have the opportunity to work with you too. Check out the link in the description to learn more. John, thanks for joining us today. Kwame, it's great to be with you, my friend. Yeah, it's great to have you. So how about you started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do? So I have the great honor of being the president of Otterbine University in Westerville, Ohio, school of about 3,000 students, professional programs,

liberal arts, sort of everything that higher ed's supposed to be. I'm a little biased, of course.

We have outstanding faculty in the MBA program. I don't know if you've

heard about that, Kwame, but they're really are remarkable individuals. And I've been here, this is the

end of my second year. I'm a junior now, and I was president of another small college last, so I've

been at this for a little while. Fantastic. Yes, I've been looking forward to this for a while.

And for the listeners who don't know, yes, I do teach at the Otterbine's MBA program.

Now my class is going to be all online, so that's going to be an interesting challenge.

But we're going to make it happen.

And so I think that's a great segue for what we're going to talk about today

because, of course, the name of the podcast is negotiate anything. And John, you've been negotiating

a lot of things since the pandemic has started. Nonstop. Yeah, negotiating a pandemic. I sometimes

have to remind people we were founded in 1847. So we have survived a civil war, two world

wars, a pandemic. I mean, like, Otterbine has been through this before. And we'll make it through

this too. But it is certainly the largest crisis that certainly has ever been a part of my career.

And the negotiation is very apt because normally my job is

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