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Gabriela Lazar had wide experience of international negotiations in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and retail sectors before becoming a negotiation skills trainer.
She joined Hartley-Brewer Negotiation Consultants in 2001 and has run numerous high level negotiation skills courses for clients ranging from investment banks and private equity houses through energy and logistics firms to retailers and pharma companies.
Born in Romania, she graduated in Pharmacy from the Bucharest Institute of Medicine & Pharmacy, having achieved the highest marks in the competitive entrance examination.
She was a member of the Romanian national basketball team, sometimes as the captain, and also won the national championship several times with her club team.
After the fall of the communist regime Gabriela left Romania and went to Paris, where she obtained a PhD with Written Congratulations of the Jury, winning a prize for the best PhD in Pharmacology. She worked in a pharmaceutical research laboratory in parallel with her studies, becoming Head of Skin Care Evaluation, and co-authored four international patents.
Gabriela then worked in the UK, Germany and France in international Business Development roles in the healthcare industry. She was involved in negotiating licensing agreements and acquisitions and disposals of companies and products internationally. She also successfully negotiated a number of complex distribution contracts while leading a team responsible for the integration across much of Europe of a major acquired product range.
Gabriela speaks fluent English, French and Romanian and has a working knowledge of German and Italian. She enjoys skiing, scuba diving, sailing and horse riding.
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The Monkey is one of the vivid images we use in our training to make a key concept memorable. This image in particular has become a totem for our firm: a toy monkey attends every course, and the BBC made a documentary about us titled The Monkey Man.
A “monkey on your back” is a problem you have – in negotiation terms, that makes you want a deal even on bad terms. E.g. you’re under time pressure / you don’t have any other offers / you think the quality of the other offers is poor.
Monkeys lead most negotiators to underestimate their own relative power and so negotiate too ‘chicken’. And there is a structural reason for this error. – When you look at your own situation you are only too aware of your own monkeys. But the other party may not be aware of these factors.• At the same time, the other guy has problems too – and he isn’t going to tell you about the monkeys on his back as this would only weaken his position. • So you have a distorted view of the power balance. It’s distorted because you have taken account of all your monkeys, but have not allowed for the monkeys he almost certainly has on his back – because you don’t know about those. And the distortion is always in the same direction: it always leads you to underestimate your own power.
