James K. Sebenius, the first Gordon Donaldson Professor at Harvard Business School and formerly on the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. In 1982, he co-founded the Negotiation Roundtable, an ongoing forum in which hundreds of varied negotiations have been examined to extract their most valuable lessons.

Drawing on this and extensive advisory experience, he co-authored (with David Lax) The Manager as Negotiator (The Free Press, 1987) and 3D Negotiation (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). He is also the author of Negotiating the Law of the Sea (Harvard University Press) and a number of professional journal articles. He helped develop and served as expert commentator in the 1995 video, Negotiating Corporate Change.

Sebenius took the lead in Harvard Business School’s 1993 decision to require a 32-session negotiation course as part of the MBA program. He now serves as Course Head of the seven full-time HBS faculty who are responsible for teaching this required course to more than 800 first-year MBA candidates as well as offering advanced negotiation courses. He also helped to found the first seminar on negotiation for top executives ever offered by the Harvard Business School and has consistently been one of the most highly rated professors in Harvard's various executive programs in negotiation. He is now Director of the Business School-Kennedy School Negotiation Roundtable and a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

In 1989, Sebenius was selected by the Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce (Osaka) as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons (under 40) from around the world, an honor that involved an extended visit to Japan, meetings with many corporate leaders, and an audience with the new Emperor and Empress.

Sebenius left Harvard in the mid-1980s to work full-time for investment banker Peter G. Peterson, co-founder with Stephen Schwarzman of the New York-based Blackstone Group, now one of the world's leading merchant banking and private equity firms. For several years following Blackstone's launch, Sebenius worked closely with Peterson and Schwarzman, initially as vice president, and later as Special Adviser to the firm after returning to Harvard. In its first year, Blackstone announced transactions valued at over $11 billion and advised over a dozen major corporate clients (including Squibb, American Can Company, American International Group, Inc., Armco Inc., COMSAT, CSX Corp., Eaton Corp., Firestone Tire and Rubber, Saatchi and Saatchi Company PLC, and Sony Corporation) on a wide variety of financial and strategic negotiations including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, recapitalizations, and divestitures. Subsequently, Blackstone has raised almost $1 billion in equity for Blackstone Capital Partners and has acted as primary financial advisor on three of the largest U.S.-Japanese deals to date. Since returning to Harvard, Sebenius has continued to work actively as Special Advisor to the firm.

Sebenius served from 1976 to 1977 as assistant to Robert White, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, and from 1977 to 1980 with the State Department on the U.S. Delegation to the Law of the Sea negotiations led by Elliot Richardson. In 1984, he was elected a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. From 1989-1992, he served as advisor to the Select Automotive Panel, a joint U.S.-Canadian body, established following the U.S. Canadian Free Trade Agreement to deal with outstanding auto trade issues; the Panel consisted of the heads of the three major auto companies, the heads of the United Auto Workers and the Canadian Auto Workers, as well as numerous auto industry representatives. He was also a member of the Auto Parts Advisory Committee, United States Department of Commerce (appointed by the Secretary of Commerce in 1990).

Sebenius is a founder and principal of Lax Sebenius LLC, a firm that provides negotiation advisory services to a variety of domestic and foreign corporations and governments.

Sebenius holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in business economics, a masters degree in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford's Engineering School, and an undergraduate degree (summa cum laude) from Vanderbilt in mathematics and English.