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Barry Nalebuff  

Milton Steinbach Professor of Management at Yale School of Managment, Co-Founder of Honest Tea & Chairman of KomBrewCha

Barry Nalebuff is Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale SOM, where for thirty years he has taught negotiation, innovation, strategy, and game theory. He is the coauthor of seven books and an online course. Thinking Strategically and The Art of Strategy are two crossover books on game theory with more than 400,000 copies in print. Co-opetition looks beyond zero-sum games to emphasize the potential for cooperating while competing. Why Not? offers a framework for problem solving and ingenuity. Lifecycle Investing provides a new strategy for retirement investing. Mission in a Bottle tells the story of Honest Tea. His most recent book is Split the Pie, which is based on his negotiation course at SOM. An online version of the negotiation course is available for free on Coursera. It has 400,000 active learners and the second-highest rating on the Coursera platform.

In 1998, Nalebuff—together with his former student Seth Goldman—cofounded Honest Tea. In 2011, the company was purchased by Coca-Cola. His second venture, Kombrewcha, is a slightly alcoholic version of kombucha. The company was acquired in 2016 by AB-Inbev. He is currently working to build Real Made Foods.

He works with many entrepreneurial firms. He serves on the board of Q Drinks (started by his former student Jordan Silbert), Calicraft Beer, and AGP Glass. Alongside startups, he has extensive experience consulting with multinational firms. He advised the NBA in their prior negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association and served on the board of Nationwide Insurance. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar, and a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, Nalebuff earned his doctorate at Oxford University.

Speech Topics

Successful Negotiation.

In the “world’s best talk on negotiation,” Barry Nalebuff approaches the art of negotiation from a new angle. When two parties are at odds over an issue, he believes the best way to approach the situation is to first ask, “What is the pie?” In other words, what are the participants negotiating over? What could they get separately versus what can they get together? How do you grow this “pie?” An expert negotiator who advised the NBA in their talks with the National Basketball Players Association, Nalebuff teaches audiences his framework for ensuring smooth and effective negotiations that benefit all parties involved.

Why Not? The New Method for Innovation.

Nalebuff shares insights and techniques on how to take the things we see every day and think about them in a new way. He offers a primer for problem-solving with a purpose and bringing the world a few steps closer to the way it should be. Insisting that innovation is a skill that can be taught, Nalebuff distills it into a few rules of thumb, outlining four central idea-generating tools that are simple and fun. These techniques force audiences to think creatively and challenge conventional wisdom as they learn how to approach innovation in their own organizations.

Using Game Theory to Inform Business Strategy.

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It is the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. In fascinating presentations, Barry Nalebuff engages his audience and walks them through the practical applications of game theory to everyday business practices in order to help them create new, effective strategies for their own organizations. Using a diverse array of rich case studies—from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history—he shows how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Nalebuff then goes beyond the old rules of competition and cooperation to combine the advantages of both, leveraging an organization’s internal and external business relationships. With his sharp wit and warm sense of humor, he changes the way audiences look at strategy and innovation.

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