Dejun "Tony" Kong: Teaching the Art and Science of Climate-Conscious Negotiation
Dejun "Tony" Kong is associate professor of organizational leadership at Leeds and the 2025 CESR Climate Curriculum Award winner for his work incorporating sustainability issues into his course ‘Negotiating and Conflict Management’. Kong is also the 2024 CESR Impact Award winner for graduate teaching, and a Poets & Quants 40-under-40 best business professor.
"Sustainability issues require a cooperative and creative approach to negotiation, as achieving solutions to environmental challenges often requires addressing divergent interests, beliefs, values, and priorities among various stakeholders and generating creative ideas and solutions."
Negotiation is a social process in which two or more parties jointly decide how to allocate resources or solve problems while building and managing relationships. People can take a competitive approach to negotiating sustainability issues; however, such an approach typically does not work well. Only when negotiators consider both their own interests and other parties’ interests will they achieve the best or most creative solutions. As addressing sustainability issues requires creativity and management of conflict (for example, conflict over ideas or beliefs, process conflict, and emotional conflict), negotiation, as a key to conflict management and creative problem solving, is particularly important.
At the Leeds School of Business, I teach negotiation at the graduate level (MBAX 6530/6531), which helps students develop ethical and effective negotiation skills to tackle business and societal challenges. In this research-informed course, students discover principles of ethical and effective negotiation and practice negotiation skills and strategies in various types of two- and multi-party negotiation. One complex interactive simulation involves multiple stages of multiparty negotiation over wildfire mitigation, and each student represents a group of stakeholders with unique concerns and preferences. Through these types of simulations and other hands-on experiences, this course prepares Leeds students to be future leaders or key contributors of sustainable business.