
INSEAD, The Business School for the World, is proud to announce that Professors Eric Luis Uhlmann, Horacio Falcão, Roderick Swaab have won the 2025 Financial Times (FT) Responsible Business Education award for teaching.
The recognition highlights their innovative course, Advanced Online Negotiations (AON), a four-week online elective available to MBA participants across INSEAD’s Europe, Asia, and Middle East campuses.
The AON course tackles the complexity of sustainability issues by focusing on case studies from the global south. Participants engage with real-world cases with pressing issues, such as:
• Golden Standard: Managing stakeholder relations among a mining company, local governments and indigenous communities in Latin America
• Astra: Labour-management negotiations in India
• Fuel Safe: An oil company and suppliers addressing social entrepreneurship and sustainability in Africa
• Polygon: Navigating cross-cultural differences in religion and business practices in the Middle East.
“Sustainability is a crucial negotiation variable,” said the professors. “We train participants to adopt win-win strategies, emphasising that these methods foster sustainable outcomes where no party feels marginalised. Win-win strategies help build stronger, collaborative relationships essential for addressing sustainability challenges.”
Professor Falcão further highlighted that the course “teaches students to use sustainable negotiation tactics to forge antifragile, inclusive deals, even under the most challenging conditions”. It has been adapted for the modern era because of the realisation that sustainability cannot be “imposed” in local communities but needs to be an “inclusive and respectful negotiation process”.
The FT Responsible Business Education award for teaching recognises innovative programmes that tackle global challenges including climate change, sustainability, and poverty.
INSEAD Dean Francisco Veloso commented that, “Congratulations to our professors! This recognition from the Financial Times underscores INSEAD’s mission of developing responsible leaders who transform business and society. It is a testament of how we integrate sustainability into business education, empowering our graduates to lead with purpose.”
Created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the AON course has since attracted over 1000 MBA participants, inspired the creation of a similar online course in Executive Education, and continues to see growing interest.
The positive reception inspired the professors to unite their expertise and launch the Negotiation and Conflict Management Collaborative (NCMC) in 2022. The initiative brings scholars and practitioners together to collaborate on research and education on negotiation and conflict management. In November 2024, the NCMC launched a free Negotiation Course for the World to make quality negotiation teaching materials and expertise accessible to all, and in so doing, democratise negotiation education.