Chris Voss is the CEO & Founder of the Black Swan Group Ltd
Author of Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.

He has used his many years of experience in international crisis and high-stakes negotiations to develop a unique program and team that applies these globally proven techniques to the business world.

Prior to 2008, Chris was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. During his government career, he also represented the U.S. Government at two (2) international conferences sponsored by the G-8 as an expert in kidnapping. Prior to becoming the FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, Christopher served as the lead Crisis Negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI. Christopher was a member of the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force for 14 years.  He was the case agent on such cases as TERRSTOP (the Blind Sheikh Case – Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman), the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe and negotiated the surrender of the first hostage taker to give up in the Chase Manhattan bank robbery hostage taking.

During Chris’s 24 year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. He is also a recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service.

Chris has taught business negotiation in the MBA program as an adjunct professor at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.  He has taught business negotiation at Harvard University, guest lectured at The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, The IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland and The Goethe School of Business in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 2009 Christopher has also worked with Insite Security as their Managing Director of the Kidnapping Resolution Practice.

Deepak Malhotra is the Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His teaching, research and advisory work is focused on negotiation, deal-making and conflict resolution. In 2020, Deepak was named “MBA Professor of the Year” (worldwide) by Poets & Quants. He has won numerous awards for his teaching & research and has been selected by Harvard MBA students to give the end-of-year speech to the graduating class multiple times. Deepak is also the best-selling author of four best-selling books. His latest, The Peacemaker’s Code, is currently being developed as a TV series.

Deepak’s research has been published in top journals in the fields of management, psychology, conflict resolution, and foreign policy. He also serves as Faculty Chair for the Owner/President Management Program for business owners and entrepreneurs. Outside HBS, Deepak is a trainer, consultant, and advisor to firms & CEOs across the globe, and an advisor to governments that are trying to negotiate an end to protracted & intractable armed conflicts. In 2020, Deepak created a series of 40 short videos w/ free advice on topics related to negotiation, deal-making, sales, conflict resolution & diplomacy. You can find the “Negotiation Insights Series” on YouTube.

Deepak’s books include:

1. Negotiation Genius, recipient of the “Outstanding Book Award” by the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution.
2. Negotiating the Impossible, named “#1 Business Book of 2016” by KnowSquare, and a “Top 10 Business Books of 2016” by The Globe and Mail.
3. I Moved Your Cheese, a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.
4. The Peacemaker’s Code, winner of the “National Indie Excellence Award” for best science fiction book of 2021.

Brian Tracy is Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations. Brian’s goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined. Brian Tracy has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada and 70 other countries worldwide. As a Keynote speaker and seminar leader, he addresses more than 250,000 people each year. He has studied, researched, written and spoken for 30 years in the fields of economics, history, business, philosophy and psychology. He is the top selling author of over 70 books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He has written and produced more than 300 audio and video learning programs, including the worldwide, best-selling Psychology of Achievement, which has been translated into more than 28 languages.

William Ury, co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, is one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation and mediation. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project.

He is co-author with Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton of Getting to Yes, a fifteen-million-copy bestseller translated into over thirty-five languages, and the author of Getting Past No, The Power of a Positive No, The Third Side, and, most recently, the award-winning Getting to Yes with Yourself.

Over the past thirty-five years, William has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from Kentucky wildcat coal mine strikes to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and former Soviet Union, and most recently in Colombia, where he serves as a senior advisor to President Juan Manuel Santos. With former president Jimmy Carter, William co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. He has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers around the world.

During the 1980s, he helped the U.S. and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert an accidental nuclear war. In that capacity, he served as a consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House. William is co-founder of the Climate Parliament, which offers members of congress and parliament across the world an Internet-based forum to address practical solutions for climate change. Time magazine described the organization as a “Google for global politics.”

William is founder of the Abraham Path Initiative, which shines a light on the ancient path of Abraham, the legendary common ancestor of over half of humanity, celebrated for his kindness and hospitality toward perfect strangers. The initiative supports trails along this path and inspires walks that create unlikely connections across cultures, fostering local livelihood and global understanding. Christiane Amanpour calls the Abraham Path “an unprecedented initiative to break down barriers and foster communication in the most divided region of the world.” He has a popular TED talk about the Abraham Path, entitled “The Walk from No to Yes.”

William is the recipient of the Whitney North Seymour Award from the American Arbitration Association and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament. His work has been widely featured in the media, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, CNN, and the BBC.

Trained as a social anthropologist, with a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard, William has carried out his research on negotiation not only in the boardroom and at the bargaining table, but also among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the clan warriors of New Guinea.

​Named one of the top 15 professors at Harvard University, Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., is founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, associate professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital, and affiliate faculty at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.  He consults regularly for government leaders and Fortune 500 companies, and has advised everyone from hostage negotiators to families in crisis, disputing CEOs to clashing heads of state.

He has launched successful conflict resolution initiatives in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia, and for three years chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Resolution.  Through non-profit funding, he developed a conflict management program that now reaches one million youth across more than twenty countries.   He has published extensively in the field of conflict resolution, and is author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable and coauthor of the classic Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.  Dr. Shapiro also has contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other popular publications, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year award.  The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.

His life’s joy is spending time with his wife and three young boys—who have proven to be his greatest teachers in how to negotiate the nonnegotiable.

Mark Raffan is the founder of Negotiations Ninja Training, a training and coaching business dedicated to developing and delivering the most engaging training and coaching in the world. Having spent many years in c-suite negotiations, Mark decided to start his own firm to educate and train executives, M&A teams, sales teams, and procurement teams how to execute better negotiations and get more value out of their deals. Utilizing his extensive experience speaking to executives and their employees on the topics of negotiation, Mark leverages the data and teams that already exist in businesses to drive more value by providing them with the tools they need to succeed. He coaches executives and their teams how to “do more with less” by teaching them how to use their existing resources to drive up profitability. Mark teaches businesses how to reduce the cost of acquisition and increase the volume of sales to the business to increase performance, profitability, and make more efficient use of time and assets.

Mark Raffan is the host of the Negotiations Ninja Podcast, the number 1 negotiation podcast on Google Play. Mark started Negotiations Ninja Podcast because he noticed a MASSIVE negotiation knowledge gap in the market. Mark interviews FBI negotiators, influential executives, world leading sales gurus, legal masterminds, and expert communicators to draw out what works in negotiation, what doesn’t work, and what we can do to get better.

Linda Swindling is a thought-leader in the areas of negotiations, communications, influence and leadership. Linda is CEO of Journey On, a Dallas-based professional development organization which offers speaking, training, consulting and executive coaching services.

Linda first addressed employment and workplace communication issues as a successful attorney and mediator. In 2000, Linda left a ten year legal practice and a partnership to give her full-time efforts to Journey On, a professional development company. In addition to running Journey On, Linda spent five years with Vistage, the world’s largest CEO development organization. During her role as a Chair, she advised and mentored CEOs and key executives both in one-to-one settings and in groups.

Linda earned a BA degree in Broadcast Journalism with a JD degree from Texas Tech School of Law. A Board Certified Coach, Linda is certified in the COREMAP assessment, the RAMP method and as a ToPS facilitator. She has received training from the University of Houston’s A.A. White’s Institute for Dispute Resolution, the Attorney Mediators Institute and the Coach Academy International. In addition, Linda completed “Teaching Negotiation in the Corporation” through the Program on Negotiation, an inter-university consortium of Harvard University, MIT and Tufts University. A Certified Speaking Professional, Linda is the past president of the National Speakers Association/North Texas and served as a national officer and the dean of the Speakers Academy for the National Speakers Association.

A TEDxSMU presenter, she is the author of the books: Ask Outrageously! The Secret to Getting What You Really Want, Stop Complainers and Energy Drainers: How to Negotiate Work Drama to Get More Done, The Manager’s High Performance Handbook: How to Drive Winning Performance with Everyone on Your Team, and Wintegrity: Win with Ethics, Trust & Integrity. Linda has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and is the creator of the popular Passports to Success book series. Find out more at www.AskOutrageously.com and www.StopComplainers.com.

Sheila Heen has been with the Harvard Negotiation Project for twenty years, teaching negotiation and difficult conversations at Harvard Law School and in Harvard’s executive education programs.

She is also CEO of Triad Consulting in Harvard Square, where she specializes in working with executive teams on issues where there is strong disagreement and emotions run high. She has worked with corporate clients on six continents, with the US White House, the Singapore Supreme Court, and with theologians with disagreements on the nature of truth and God.

Visit Sheila and Doug’s author page at www.stoneandheen.com, and Triad Consulting at www.triadconsultinggroup.com.

Sheila’s husband, John Richardson, also teaches negotiation — down the street at MIT. He is the author of “Negotiation Analysis” with Howard Raiffa and of “Getting it Done” with Roger Fisher and Alan Sharpe. They are both schooled in negotiation daily by their three children.

G. Richard Shell is the Thomas Gerrity Professor of Legal Studies, Business Ethics, and Management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The latest (3rd) edition of his award-winning Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (Penguin) appeared in 2019. In addition, his book Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success (Portfolio 2013) was named both Business Book of the Year and Personal Development Book of the Year by the largest business bookseller in the United States and was short-listed for Management Book of the Year by the British Library. He is also author of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas (Portfolio 2007) (with Mario Moussa) and Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will (Crown Business 2004). He serves as Director of Wharton’s Executive Negotiation Workshop and Strategic Persuasion Workshop. He has won multiple teaching and scholarly awards, had his work cited by the United States Supreme Court, and taught people from all walks of professional life, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 CEOs to FBI hostage negotiators, Navy SEALs, and United Nations peacekeepers.

Greg is a people-person who cares for the well-being of others. That is why he teaches people how to negotiate while reading body language, to increase their value and get more from every negotiation. And he has presented negotiation and reading body language training and consultations to people in 14 countries.

Greg is a Harvard-trained negotiator with a wealth of 30-plus years of negotiation and reading body language experience. Known as ‘The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert,’ he is an accomplished author, speaker, trainer, and a recognized worldwide thought leader on negotiation and reading body language.

The research firm, Global Gurus, has double-ranked Greg in negotiation and body language among the top 30 gurus worldwide. In addition, Greg is also a member of the famed Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches – individuals who coach such people as Serena Williams, Richard Branson, and other well-known world-recognized public figures.

In the capacity of TV News Contributor, Greg has appeared on all U.S. major TV networks and some in other countries. Greg has written seven books about negotiations and reading body language, and he’s currently writing number eight.

Greg’s motto is, “you’re always negotiating!”

Stuart Diamond is one of the world’s foremost experts on negotiation. His negotiation course at top-ranked Wharton Business School has been the most sought-after by MBA students there over the past 20 years. Diamond and his team of 25 have trained more than 12,000 Googlers in his innovative model of human interaction.

Professor Diamond has trained more than 5,000 Special Ops soldiers, the elite of the U.S. military: Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Marines, Special Forces and others in finding better ways to negotiate – from collecting better intelligence to dealing with the chain of command to meeting more family needs. “Saves lives,” was the comment written about his model by U.S. Special Operations Command.

Professor Diamond’s book on negotiations, Getting More: How To Be A More Persuasive Person in Work and Life, is a New York Times bestseller and #1 U.S. business bestseller on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today lists. Worldwide it has sold more than 1.2 million copies and has been translated into 19 languages. The Wall Street Journal’s career site calls Getting More “#1 book to read for your career.” Lawyers Weekly called it “phenomenal.” The Commander of U.S. Special Ops has placed it on his read list of 15 books; it is only one of two books on military science.

Professor Diamond has a law degree from Harvard, an MBA from Wharton. In a prior career he was a journalist for The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team investigating the 1986 crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger. He was Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School and directed its outside negotiation consulting firm.

He used the innovative Getting More process, which focuses on emotional intelligence, perceptions and collaborations — while insisting on fairness — to solve the 2008 Writer Strike in Hollywood; a multibillion dollar electronic trading rights dispute among exchanges in New York, and numerous international political and financial issues. They include coordinating the largest foreign-sourced commercial financing in Ukraine history, advising the President and ministers of Nicaragua in solving public image and insurgency issues, and developing an international strategy for a $14 billion petrochemical company in China.

Among the 30,000 people Diamond has taught or advised in 50+ countries, more than 220 are managers and executives from the Fortune 500 companies. Another 25% are of the Global 1000 community. He has trained school children in South Africa, bankers in Dubai, art dealers in Arizona and car dealers in Russia. He has also headed or managed companies in various industries. He has been chairman of a publicly-traded U.S. high tech company in the wireless space, convinced 3,000 farmers in Bolivia to forsake coca for bananas, operated a medical services company performing laser eye surgery and worked on Wall Street as an energy futures executive.

Besides Wharton, Professor Diamond has also taught at Penn Law School, Penn Engineering, Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, NYC, UC Berkeley and USC. He is also an expert in cross-cultural negotiation and diversity and has advised on the subject to the United Nations, World Bank and many companies. He has written 3 books, 2 documentary films and more than 2,000 articles, including dozens on page 1 of The New York Times.

Keld Jensen brings a unique blend of real-world experience and strategic problem solving to the global conversation on optimizing business transactions through the science of negotiation.

Through his experience as CEO of several publicly traded Scandinavian companies, his participation in numerous start-ups, and as Founder and CEO of Center for Negotiation, he advocates changing the culture of deal making organizations in order to impact the bottom line and increase shareholder value.

Jensen is a highly acclaimed and sought after speaker with over 20 years of experience on the podium where he has consistently achieved the highest audience rankings. He is regarded as a thought leader in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America and is one of the most influential authorities in the world today on negotiation as a leadership competency. Jensen is the originator of the concepts of NegoEconomics, SMARTnership and Tru$t Currency – all of which have changed the vocabulary in the field.

He is the creator of the world’s most awarded negotiation strategy – The SMARTnership Negotiation concept. It has won more than 12 international awards: In both 2015 and 2016 Jensen was appointed to be among the Top Thought Global Leaders in Trust. An exclusive group of less than 100 people globally were awarded this title. Keld Jensen has been nominated as best public speaker in Denmark. In 2017 his concept of SMARTnership won the The Best Negotiation & Tender Award from the Organization of Public Procurement Officers. The IACCM Innovation Award. The World Commerce & Contracting Strategic Award, just to mention a few. In 2021 he was accepted to the prestigious Global Gurus Top 30 list.

Most recently he is nominated, together with a client for the Social and Economic Benefit award from The World Commerce & Contracting Organization in the USA.

Keld Jensen has more than 30 years’ experience in international management, negotiation, and communication from his post as CEO of a listed Scandinavian company. As Former Chairman of the Centre for Negotiation at the Copenhagen Business School, one of the top business schools in the world, he teaches International Negotiation at prominent Executive MBA schools worldwide as an Association Professor in negotiation, trust, and behavioral economics. Aalborg University in Denmark. BMI Institute in Lithuania, Arizona State University in the USA and Louvain University in Belgium.

A prolific author, Keld has written and published 24 books in 36 countries with more than 2,8 million readers. He also writes feature articles for the national and international news media and appears in broadcast as a highly regarded commentator on international business issues. He has appeared in more than 200 TV programs. Jensen is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world.

Jensen is the founder and CEO of Center for SMARTnership Negotiation, a consulting and training organization that assist and advice private industry and governmental bodies in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa. Among his clients is: LEGO, B&O, Mercedes, ThermoFisher, Canadian, British and Danish Governments, NOVO Nordisk, LEGO, Johnson & Johnson, Vestas, Maersk, Rolls Royce, UNICEF and Volvo.

His company is working truly global with clients in Asia, Europe, and The Americas. Professor Jensen is considered one of the “Leading Business Minds” by the Financial Times, alongside individuals from Wharton, INSEAD, London Business School, Oxford, and other prestigious programs.

His Latest book Honest Negotiation was released in the US and quickly won the #1 New Release on Amazon award. In 2020 he released two books to help and support during the pandemic.

Keld is a dual citizen of Denmark and the USA where he resides.

Michael Wheeler is the MBA Class of 1952 Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School where teaches Negotiation as well as a variety of executive courses. In previous years he served as faculty chair of the first year MBA program and headed the required Negotiation course. He has also taught The Moral Leader; Leadership, Values, and Decision Making; and, as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Mediation & Consensus Building. At HBS he has received the Greenhill Award for his contributions to the School’s mission.

Giuseppe Conti is the founder of CABL (www.cabl.ch), a firm that offers a range of customized training in the field of negotiation and influencing.

Since 2005, Giuseppe has been an award-winning Lecturer, recognized for his lively and interactive training workshops across a number of the leading business schools in Europe: Bayes, Cambridge, EPFL, ESADE, ESSEC, HEC Lausanne, HEC Paris, IESE, IMD, Imperial College, INSEAD, London Business School, Oxford, RSM, SDA Bocconi, University of Geneva, University of St Gallen and VU Amsterdam.

More recently, he has become a Professor in Negotiation & Influencing. Giuseppe regularly runs workshops on four continents. To date, corporate leaders from multinational corporations and individuals from over 145 different countries have attended his workshops.

Giuseppe is an accomplished negotiator and integrates into his training over 25 years of executive-level experience at Blue Chip corporations (Procter & Gamble, Novartis, Firmenich, Merck).

His recent research and articles have focused on negotiating with no alternatives, influencing healthcare, gender differences in negotiation, managing internal and external negotiations, dealing with difficult people, and negotiating long-term business relationships.

Robert H. Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and for twenty-five years served as the Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. He directs the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. A leading scholar in the field of conflict resolution, Professor Mnookin has applied his interdisciplinary approach to negotiation and conflict resolution to a remarkable range of problems; both public and private.

A renowned teacher and lecturer, Professor Mnookin has taught numerous workshops for corporations, governmental agencies and law firms throughout the world and trained many executives and professionals in negotiation and mediation skills. On behalf of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, he designed and has taught annual workshops for intellectual property professionals. Professor Mnookin has served as a consultant to governments, international agencies, major corporations and law firms. As a neutral arbitrator or mediator, he has resolved numerous complex commercial disputes.

Professor Mnookin has written or edited ten books and numerous scholarly articles. His most recent books include Kissinger the Negotiator (with James K. Sebenius and R. Nicholas Burns); The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World (Public Affairs November 2018) and Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.

Erica Ariel Fox is the author of the New York Times best seller Winning From Within: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change. She teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School, where she began teaching in 1996. Erica is recognized internationally-as a thought leader who combines the deeply human aspects of negotiation with the best practices of leadership development. She is an advisor to senior leaders globally with her partners at Mobius Executive Leadership; serves as a Senior Advisor to McKinsey Leadership Development for McKinsey & Company; and also is a LinkedIn Influencer. Mixing nearly two decades of experience with business leaders and a personal touch, Erica brings a unique voice to the conversation about leading wisely and living well.

She lives with her husband and her step-son outside of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as well as outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her book has been translated into ten other languages, and was a New York Times Bestseller.

George J. Siedel is the Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration and the Thurnau Professor of Business Law at the University of Michigan. He teaches courses on negotiation, public policy, and business law at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He has also taught seminars around the world to business leaders, entrepreneurs, attorneys, judges, physicians, and athletic directors. In conjunction with his courses and seminars, he developed several free negotiation planning tools and a free app, which are available at http://www.negotiationplanner.com.

Professor Siedel completed graduate studies at the University of Michigan and Cambridge University. He served as a visiting professor at Stanford University and Harvard University and as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley. As a Fulbright Scholar, he held a Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Professor Siedel has received several national research awards, including the Maurer Award, the Ralph Bunche Award, and the Hoeber Award. He has also received many teaching awards, including 2014 and 2018 Executive Program Professor of the Year Awards from a consortium of 36 leading universities committed to international education. In 2018, he received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business.

Guhan Subramanian is the Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business at Harvard Law School, the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School, and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Program on Negotiation. He is the only person in the history of Harvard University to hold tenured appointments at both HLS and HBS. At HLS he teaches courses in negotiations and corporate law. At HBS he teaches in several executive education programs, such as Strategic Negotiations, Changing the Game, Managing Negotiators and the Deal Process, and Making Corporate Boards More Effective. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty he spent three years at McKinsey & Company in their New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. offices.

Professor Subramanian’s research explores topics in negotiations, corporate dealmaking, and deal process design. He has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and the Harvard Law Review, among other places. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column, the New York Times, the American Lawyer, The Deal, and Corporate Control Alert. His new book Negotiauctions: New Dealmaking Strategies for a Competitive Marketplace (Norton 2010) synthesizes the findings from his research and teaching over the past decade.

Professor Subramanian has been involved in major public-company deals such as Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $8.9 billion freeze-out of the minority shareholders in Cox Communications, the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us, and Exelon’s $8.0 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG. He also advises individuals, boards of directors, and management teams on issues of dealmaking and corporate governance.

Professor Subramanian holds degrees in Economics, Law, and Business, all from Harvard University. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Dr. Joshua N. Weiss is the co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project. He is also the Director and creator of the Master of Science degree in Leadership and Negotiation at Bay Path University. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in 2002.

Dr. Weiss has spoken and published on leadership, negotiation, mediation, and systemic approaches to dealing with conflict. In his current capacity he conducts research, consults with many different types of organizations, delivers negotiation and mediation trainings and courses, and engages in negotiation and mediation at the organizational, corporate, government, and international levels.

Dr. Weiss is the creator of a number of innovative products that use the power of present day technology to convey negotiation to a broad audience. In addition to teaching numerous synchronous and asynchronous courses and trainings over the web he has developed two products of note. The first is the Negotiation Tip of the Week (NTOW) podcast. The second is the Negotiator In You Audiobook and eBook series. The NTOW was in the top 100 iTunes Business Podcasts from 2007 to 2010 and was downloaded over 2 million times during that period. The Negotiator In You series was published in January 2012 and was in the iTunes top audiobook category for two months. An addition to the series, specifically for salespeople, was published in January of 2013.

Dr. Weiss’ most recent book, which is part of a storybook series for children to learn negotiation and conflict resolution skills, is called Phony Friends, Besties Again: The Continuing Adventures of Emo and Chickie. This is the final book in the trilogy, which also includes Bullied No More! The Continuing Adventures of Emo and Chickie, and Trouble at the Watering Hole: The Adventures of Emo and Chickie. The books are for 6 to 10 year olds.

Finally, Dr. Weiss has conducted trainings and consulted with a number of organizations, companies, and governmental entities, including: Microsoft, General Motors, United Auto Workers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Novellus, Christies Art Auction House, CDM Smith, Deloitte, Genzyme, Harvard University, Mass Mutual, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale Medical School, United Nations (Mediation Unit, UNAOC, UNITAR, and UNDP), Government of Canada, the US Government (State Department, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Park Service, and Transportation Security Administration), and various state governments.

For more than three decades, Herb Cohen has been a practicing negotiator, intimately enmeshed in some of the world’s headline dramas from hostile takeovers to hostage negotiations. His clients have included business executives, entrepreneurs, sports and theatrical agents plus large corporations – as well as governmental agencies, such as the Department of State, FBI, CIA, The US Conference of Mayors and US Department of Justice.

Unlike some theorists, he was actively involved in the negotiations that settled the NFL players’ strike and the General Motors Chevy mobile litigation and also participated in the START Arms Control Negotiations with the Soviet Union.

He started formally teaching the subject of negotiations during a two week course for attorneys in 1963 sponsored by Allstate Insurance Company. It was then he first used the terms “Win-Win. Win-Lose, Lose-Lose”.

Herb Cohen’s analysis, insights and humorous view of many of these high-level happenings have appeared in many international publications, and he himself has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, People, The Economist, The New Yorker, Esquire, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and even Playboy Magazine.

He is the author of You Can Negotiate Anything which was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost one year and has been translated into thirty languages. His latest book, Negotiate This! By Caring But Not T-H-A-T Much was published in mid-September 2003.

During the Cold War, Herb Cohen served with the U.S. Army, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment on the East-West Border in Bad Kissingen, Germany.

While attending university and law school he worked in many business and governmental organizations and ultimately became a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Business. Since then he has lectured at many educational institutions and enterprises such as The Harvard Negotiating Project, Yale Law School, The Kellogg School, Wharton, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California-San Diego, McGill University, UBC and the Columbia and Chicago University School of Business.

Alex is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School. She has spent the last eleven years helping thousands of people negotiate better, build relationships and reach their goals. In 2019, Alex was awarded the Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, Columbia University’s highest teaching honor.

Alex believes that negotiation is for everyone. She is a world-renowned negotiation trainer for groups and individuals from all over the world—including the United Nations, Fortune 100 companies, the U.S. government, foreign governments, not-for-profit organizations, universities and private law firms. Through the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School, Alex and her students provide free conflict resolution services and training to many people and organizations who otherwise would not be able to afford it.

Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Alex was associated with Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. She also worked at Goldman Sachs in the Principal Investment Area. She spent a year in Taipei, Taiwan as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar.

Alex received her Juris Doctor degree in 2003 from Columbia Law School, where she earned James Kent and Harlan Fiske Stone academic honors. She won the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for her mediation work and the Lawrence S. Greenbaum Prize for oral advocacy. She graduated cum laude from Georgetown University, where she won the Lena Landegger community service award.

Her first book, Ask for More: Ten Questions to Negotiate Anything, was published May 5th by Simon & Schuster and became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller — the first negotiation book solo-authored by a woman to make that list.

Alex lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with her husband Greg and their daughter Caroline. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and practicing yoga.

Deborah works with today’s top executives on the challenging issues of negotiation, leadership, and gender in ways that to secure wins for individuals and their organizations. Foremost authority in the fields of negotiation, leadership, and gender, she is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women in Leadership (Emerita) and co-founder of the Ford Foundation funded Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons College School of Management.

Deborah was Former Executive Director and is currently Co-Director of the Negotiations in the Workplace Project at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. She is a strategic advisor and mentor to many of today’s most successful executive women and also served as Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research in 2008-2009, and is Adjunct Faculty at INSEAD.

Kimberlyn Leary has taught courses and seminars on negotiation, clinical technique, and public policy and mental health. She has also served as a tutor to third-year medical students. She sits on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalytic Psychology, the Harvard Mental Health Letter, and Negotiation Journal. She is currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program and New America’s International Security Program, a senior advisor to the CEO at the National Math and Science Initiative, and a trustee of Amherst College.

In 1997, Leary published a paper on race and self-disclosure that won the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Karl Menninger Prize, and in 2007 she received the Ernest and Gertrude Ticho Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2010 she received the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychoanalysis award for clinical scholarship and was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow in 2014. From 2015 to 2016, she served as an advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls for one year, developing the “Advancing Equity” initiative for improving life outcomes for women and girls of color, and as an advisor to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Health Division.

Steve Gates is the founder and CEO of The Gap Partnership, the world’s leading negotiation consultancy. Founded in 1997, the company now has office worldwide. Steve and his team of negotiation consultants have advised and developed some of the world’s leading organizations with their most difficult negotiations, dealing with everything from retail trade terms to mergers and acquisitions, oil prices and trade union disputes.

Steve is the author of The Negotiation Book, this Book is an indispensable and practical guide for anyone who wants to improve their negotiation capability.

Speaker, Negotiator, Coach, Consultant

With over 30 years of experience working for the world’s largest companies and a passion for body language, Mary Redmond now shares her expertise at workshops, via webinars and through individual coaching sessions.

Mary can help you with everything from closing more sales to asking for a raise to knowing what other people are thinking. Greater confidence, self control and success are often the results of her teachings. Businesses come to Mary because she brings valuable negotiation lessons from experience, not books. Mary also negotiates complex financial contracts acting as the “secret weapon” for clients. Her unique negotiation techniques result in savings and cost reductions.

Stay 2 steps ahead of the competition and save money with an experienced negotiator! www.maryaredmond.com

Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration
www.people.hbs.edu/mbazerman

In addition to being the Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School, Max is formally affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government, the Psychology Department, and the Program on Negotiation.

Max’s research focuses on decision making in negotiation, and improving decision making in organizations, nations, and society. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eighteen books (including Negotiation Genius [with Deepak Malhotra], Bantam Books, September 2007) and over 200 research articles and chapters. He is a member of the editorial boards of the American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Management and Governance, Mind and Society, Negotiations and Conflict Management Research, and The Journal of Behavioral Finance. Also, he is a member of the international advisory board of the Negotiation Journal.

From 2002-2008, Max was consistently named one of the top 40 authors, speakers, and teachers of management by Executive Excellence. He was ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the Executive Masters Program of the Kellogg School. In 2003, Max received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, Max received an honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), the Kulp-Wright Book Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association for Predictable Surprises (with Michael Watkins), and the Life Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. In 2008, Max was named as Ethisphere’s 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics, was named one of Daily Kos’ Heroes from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco trial, received the International Institute of Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR) Outstanding Book Award, and received the Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management.
His former doctoral students have accepted positions at leading business schools throughout the United States, including the Kellogg School at Northwestern, the Fuqua School at Duke, the Johnson School at Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, Columbia, and the Harvard Business School.

Chris Voss is the CEO & Founder of the Black Swan Group Ltd
Author of Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.

He has used his many years of experience in international crisis and high-stakes negotiations to develop a unique program and team that applies these globally proven techniques to the business world.

Prior to 2008, Chris was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. During his government career, he also represented the U.S. Government at two (2) international conferences sponsored by the G-8 as an expert in kidnapping. Prior to becoming the FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, Christopher served as the lead Crisis Negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI. Christopher was a member of the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force for 14 years.  He was the case agent on such cases as TERRSTOP (the Blind Sheikh Case – Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman), the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe and negotiated the surrender of the first hostage taker to give up in the Chase Manhattan bank robbery hostage taking.

During Chris’s 24 year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. He is also a recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service.

Chris has taught business negotiation in the MBA program as an adjunct professor at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.  He has taught business negotiation at Harvard University, guest lectured at The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, The IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland and The Goethe School of Business in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 2009 Christopher has also worked with Insite Security as their Managing Director of the Kidnapping Resolution Practice.

Deepak Malhotra is the Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His teaching, research and advisory work is focused on negotiation, deal-making and conflict resolution. In 2020, Deepak was named “MBA Professor of the Year” (worldwide) by Poets & Quants. He has won numerous awards for his teaching & research and has been selected by Harvard MBA students to give the end-of-year speech to the graduating class multiple times. Deepak is also the best-selling author of four best-selling books. His latest, The Peacemaker’s Code, is currently being developed as a TV series.

Deepak’s research has been published in top journals in the fields of management, psychology, conflict resolution, and foreign policy. He also serves as Faculty Chair for the Owner/President Management Program for business owners and entrepreneurs. Outside HBS, Deepak is a trainer, consultant, and advisor to firms & CEOs across the globe, and an advisor to governments that are trying to negotiate an end to protracted & intractable armed conflicts. In 2020, Deepak created a series of 40 short videos w/ free advice on topics related to negotiation, deal-making, sales, conflict resolution & diplomacy. You can find the “Negotiation Insights Series” on YouTube.

Deepak’s books include:

1. Negotiation Genius, recipient of the “Outstanding Book Award” by the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution.
2. Negotiating the Impossible, named “#1 Business Book of 2016” by KnowSquare, and a “Top 10 Business Books of 2016” by The Globe and Mail.
3. I Moved Your Cheese, a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.
4. The Peacemaker’s Code, winner of the “National Indie Excellence Award” for best science fiction book of 2021.

Brian Tracy is Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations. Brian’s goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined. Brian Tracy has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada and 70 other countries worldwide. As a Keynote speaker and seminar leader, he addresses more than 250,000 people each year. He has studied, researched, written and spoken for 30 years in the fields of economics, history, business, philosophy and psychology. He is the top selling author of over 70 books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He has written and produced more than 300 audio and video learning programs, including the worldwide, best-selling Psychology of Achievement, which has been translated into more than 28 languages.

William Ury, co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, is one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation and mediation. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project.

He is co-author with Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton of Getting to Yes, a fifteen-million-copy bestseller translated into over thirty-five languages, and the author of Getting Past No, The Power of a Positive No, The Third Side, and, most recently, the award-winning Getting to Yes with Yourself.

Over the past thirty-five years, William has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from Kentucky wildcat coal mine strikes to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and former Soviet Union, and most recently in Colombia, where he serves as a senior advisor to President Juan Manuel Santos. With former president Jimmy Carter, William co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. He has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers around the world.

During the 1980s, he helped the U.S. and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert an accidental nuclear war. In that capacity, he served as a consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House. William is co-founder of the Climate Parliament, which offers members of congress and parliament across the world an Internet-based forum to address practical solutions for climate change. Time magazine described the organization as a “Google for global politics.”

William is founder of the Abraham Path Initiative, which shines a light on the ancient path of Abraham, the legendary common ancestor of over half of humanity, celebrated for his kindness and hospitality toward perfect strangers. The initiative supports trails along this path and inspires walks that create unlikely connections across cultures, fostering local livelihood and global understanding. Christiane Amanpour calls the Abraham Path “an unprecedented initiative to break down barriers and foster communication in the most divided region of the world.” He has a popular TED talk about the Abraham Path, entitled “The Walk from No to Yes.”

William is the recipient of the Whitney North Seymour Award from the American Arbitration Association and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament. His work has been widely featured in the media, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, CNN, and the BBC.

Trained as a social anthropologist, with a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard, William has carried out his research on negotiation not only in the boardroom and at the bargaining table, but also among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the clan warriors of New Guinea.

​Named one of the top 15 professors at Harvard University, Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., is founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, associate professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital, and affiliate faculty at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.  He consults regularly for government leaders and Fortune 500 companies, and has advised everyone from hostage negotiators to families in crisis, disputing CEOs to clashing heads of state.

He has launched successful conflict resolution initiatives in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia, and for three years chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Resolution.  Through non-profit funding, he developed a conflict management program that now reaches one million youth across more than twenty countries.   He has published extensively in the field of conflict resolution, and is author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable and coauthor of the classic Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.  Dr. Shapiro also has contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other popular publications, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year award.  The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.

His life’s joy is spending time with his wife and three young boys—who have proven to be his greatest teachers in how to negotiate the nonnegotiable.

Mark Raffan is the founder of Negotiations Ninja Training, a training and coaching business dedicated to developing and delivering the most engaging training and coaching in the world. Having spent many years in c-suite negotiations, Mark decided to start his own firm to educate and train executives, M&A teams, sales teams, and procurement teams how to execute better negotiations and get more value out of their deals. Utilizing his extensive experience speaking to executives and their employees on the topics of negotiation, Mark leverages the data and teams that already exist in businesses to drive more value by providing them with the tools they need to succeed. He coaches executives and their teams how to “do more with less” by teaching them how to use their existing resources to drive up profitability. Mark teaches businesses how to reduce the cost of acquisition and increase the volume of sales to the business to increase performance, profitability, and make more efficient use of time and assets.

Mark Raffan is the host of the Negotiations Ninja Podcast, the number 1 negotiation podcast on Google Play. Mark started Negotiations Ninja Podcast because he noticed a MASSIVE negotiation knowledge gap in the market. Mark interviews FBI negotiators, influential executives, world leading sales gurus, legal masterminds, and expert communicators to draw out what works in negotiation, what doesn’t work, and what we can do to get better.

Linda Swindling is a thought-leader in the areas of negotiations, communications, influence and leadership. Linda is CEO of Journey On, a Dallas-based professional development organization which offers speaking, training, consulting and executive coaching services.

Linda first addressed employment and workplace communication issues as a successful attorney and mediator. In 2000, Linda left a ten year legal practice and a partnership to give her full-time efforts to Journey On, a professional development company. In addition to running Journey On, Linda spent five years with Vistage, the world’s largest CEO development organization. During her role as a Chair, she advised and mentored CEOs and key executives both in one-to-one settings and in groups.

Linda earned a BA degree in Broadcast Journalism with a JD degree from Texas Tech School of Law. A Board Certified Coach, Linda is certified in the COREMAP assessment, the RAMP method and as a ToPS facilitator. She has received training from the University of Houston’s A.A. White’s Institute for Dispute Resolution, the Attorney Mediators Institute and the Coach Academy International. In addition, Linda completed “Teaching Negotiation in the Corporation” through the Program on Negotiation, an inter-university consortium of Harvard University, MIT and Tufts University. A Certified Speaking Professional, Linda is the past president of the National Speakers Association/North Texas and served as a national officer and the dean of the Speakers Academy for the National Speakers Association.

A TEDxSMU presenter, she is the author of the books: Ask Outrageously! The Secret to Getting What You Really Want, Stop Complainers and Energy Drainers: How to Negotiate Work Drama to Get More Done, The Manager’s High Performance Handbook: How to Drive Winning Performance with Everyone on Your Team, and Wintegrity: Win with Ethics, Trust & Integrity. Linda has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and is the creator of the popular Passports to Success book series. Find out more at www.AskOutrageously.com and www.StopComplainers.com.

Sheila Heen has been with the Harvard Negotiation Project for twenty years, teaching negotiation and difficult conversations at Harvard Law School and in Harvard’s executive education programs.

She is also CEO of Triad Consulting in Harvard Square, where she specializes in working with executive teams on issues where there is strong disagreement and emotions run high. She has worked with corporate clients on six continents, with the US White House, the Singapore Supreme Court, and with theologians with disagreements on the nature of truth and God.

Visit Sheila and Doug’s author page at www.stoneandheen.com, and Triad Consulting at www.triadconsultinggroup.com.

Sheila’s husband, John Richardson, also teaches negotiation — down the street at MIT. He is the author of “Negotiation Analysis” with Howard Raiffa and of “Getting it Done” with Roger Fisher and Alan Sharpe. They are both schooled in negotiation daily by their three children.

G. Richard Shell is the Thomas Gerrity Professor of Legal Studies, Business Ethics, and Management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The latest (3rd) edition of his award-winning Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (Penguin) appeared in 2019. In addition, his book Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success (Portfolio 2013) was named both Business Book of the Year and Personal Development Book of the Year by the largest business bookseller in the United States and was short-listed for Management Book of the Year by the British Library. He is also author of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas (Portfolio 2007) (with Mario Moussa) and Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will (Crown Business 2004). He serves as Director of Wharton’s Executive Negotiation Workshop and Strategic Persuasion Workshop. He has won multiple teaching and scholarly awards, had his work cited by the United States Supreme Court, and taught people from all walks of professional life, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 CEOs to FBI hostage negotiators, Navy SEALs, and United Nations peacekeepers.

Greg is a people-person who cares for the well-being of others. That is why he teaches people how to negotiate while reading body language, to increase their value and get more from every negotiation. And he has presented negotiation and reading body language training and consultations to people in 14 countries.

Greg is a Harvard-trained negotiator with a wealth of 30-plus years of negotiation and reading body language experience. Known as ‘The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert,’ he is an accomplished author, speaker, trainer, and a recognized worldwide thought leader on negotiation and reading body language.

The research firm, Global Gurus, has double-ranked Greg in negotiation and body language among the top 30 gurus worldwide. In addition, Greg is also a member of the famed Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches – individuals who coach such people as Serena Williams, Richard Branson, and other well-known world-recognized public figures.

In the capacity of TV News Contributor, Greg has appeared on all U.S. major TV networks and some in other countries. Greg has written seven books about negotiations and reading body language, and he’s currently writing number eight.

Greg’s motto is, “you’re always negotiating!”

Stuart Diamond is one of the world’s foremost experts on negotiation. His negotiation course at top-ranked Wharton Business School has been the most sought-after by MBA students there over the past 20 years. Diamond and his team of 25 have trained more than 12,000 Googlers in his innovative model of human interaction.

Professor Diamond has trained more than 5,000 Special Ops soldiers, the elite of the U.S. military: Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Marines, Special Forces and others in finding better ways to negotiate – from collecting better intelligence to dealing with the chain of command to meeting more family needs. “Saves lives,” was the comment written about his model by U.S. Special Operations Command.

Professor Diamond’s book on negotiations, Getting More: How To Be A More Persuasive Person in Work and Life, is a New York Times bestseller and #1 U.S. business bestseller on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today lists. Worldwide it has sold more than 1.2 million copies and has been translated into 19 languages. The Wall Street Journal’s career site calls Getting More “#1 book to read for your career.” Lawyers Weekly called it “phenomenal.” The Commander of U.S. Special Ops has placed it on his read list of 15 books; it is only one of two books on military science.

Professor Diamond has a law degree from Harvard, an MBA from Wharton. In a prior career he was a journalist for The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team investigating the 1986 crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger. He was Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School and directed its outside negotiation consulting firm.

He used the innovative Getting More process, which focuses on emotional intelligence, perceptions and collaborations — while insisting on fairness — to solve the 2008 Writer Strike in Hollywood; a multibillion dollar electronic trading rights dispute among exchanges in New York, and numerous international political and financial issues. They include coordinating the largest foreign-sourced commercial financing in Ukraine history, advising the President and ministers of Nicaragua in solving public image and insurgency issues, and developing an international strategy for a $14 billion petrochemical company in China.

Among the 30,000 people Diamond has taught or advised in 50+ countries, more than 220 are managers and executives from the Fortune 500 companies. Another 25% are of the Global 1000 community. He has trained school children in South Africa, bankers in Dubai, art dealers in Arizona and car dealers in Russia. He has also headed or managed companies in various industries. He has been chairman of a publicly-traded U.S. high tech company in the wireless space, convinced 3,000 farmers in Bolivia to forsake coca for bananas, operated a medical services company performing laser eye surgery and worked on Wall Street as an energy futures executive.

Besides Wharton, Professor Diamond has also taught at Penn Law School, Penn Engineering, Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, NYC, UC Berkeley and USC. He is also an expert in cross-cultural negotiation and diversity and has advised on the subject to the United Nations, World Bank and many companies. He has written 3 books, 2 documentary films and more than 2,000 articles, including dozens on page 1 of The New York Times.

Keld Jensen brings a unique blend of real-world experience and strategic problem solving to the global conversation on optimizing business transactions through the science of negotiation.

Through his experience as CEO of several publicly traded Scandinavian companies, his participation in numerous start-ups, and as Founder and CEO of Center for Negotiation, he advocates changing the culture of deal making organizations in order to impact the bottom line and increase shareholder value.

Jensen is a highly acclaimed and sought after speaker with over 20 years of experience on the podium where he has consistently achieved the highest audience rankings. He is regarded as a thought leader in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America and is one of the most influential authorities in the world today on negotiation as a leadership competency. Jensen is the originator of the concepts of NegoEconomics, SMARTnership and Tru$t Currency – all of which have changed the vocabulary in the field.

He is the creator of the world’s most awarded negotiation strategy – The SMARTnership Negotiation concept. It has won more than 12 international awards: In both 2015 and 2016 Jensen was appointed to be among the Top Thought Global Leaders in Trust. An exclusive group of less than 100 people globally were awarded this title. Keld Jensen has been nominated as best public speaker in Denmark. In 2017 his concept of SMARTnership won the The Best Negotiation & Tender Award from the Organization of Public Procurement Officers. The IACCM Innovation Award. The World Commerce & Contracting Strategic Award, just to mention a few. In 2021 he was accepted to the prestigious Global Gurus Top 30 list.

Most recently he is nominated, together with a client for the Social and Economic Benefit award from The World Commerce & Contracting Organization in the USA.

Keld Jensen has more than 30 years’ experience in international management, negotiation, and communication from his post as CEO of a listed Scandinavian company. As Former Chairman of the Centre for Negotiation at the Copenhagen Business School, one of the top business schools in the world, he teaches International Negotiation at prominent Executive MBA schools worldwide as an Association Professor in negotiation, trust, and behavioral economics. Aalborg University in Denmark. BMI Institute in Lithuania, Arizona State University in the USA and Louvain University in Belgium.

A prolific author, Keld has written and published 24 books in 36 countries with more than 2,8 million readers. He also writes feature articles for the national and international news media and appears in broadcast as a highly regarded commentator on international business issues. He has appeared in more than 200 TV programs. Jensen is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world.

Jensen is the founder and CEO of Center for SMARTnership Negotiation, a consulting and training organization that assist and advice private industry and governmental bodies in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa. Among his clients is: LEGO, B&O, Mercedes, ThermoFisher, Canadian, British and Danish Governments, NOVO Nordisk, LEGO, Johnson & Johnson, Vestas, Maersk, Rolls Royce, UNICEF and Volvo.

His company is working truly global with clients in Asia, Europe, and The Americas. Professor Jensen is considered one of the “Leading Business Minds” by the Financial Times, alongside individuals from Wharton, INSEAD, London Business School, Oxford, and other prestigious programs.

His Latest book Honest Negotiation was released in the US and quickly won the #1 New Release on Amazon award. In 2020 he released two books to help and support during the pandemic.

Keld is a dual citizen of Denmark and the USA where he resides.

Michael Wheeler is the MBA Class of 1952 Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School where teaches Negotiation as well as a variety of executive courses. In previous years he served as faculty chair of the first year MBA program and headed the required Negotiation course. He has also taught The Moral Leader; Leadership, Values, and Decision Making; and, as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Mediation & Consensus Building. At HBS he has received the Greenhill Award for his contributions to the School’s mission.

Giuseppe Conti is the founder of CABL (www.cabl.ch), a firm that offers a range of customized training in the field of negotiation and influencing.

Since 2005, Giuseppe has been an award-winning Lecturer, recognized for his lively and interactive training workshops across a number of the leading business schools in Europe: Bayes, Cambridge, EPFL, ESADE, ESSEC, HEC Lausanne, HEC Paris, IESE, IMD, Imperial College, INSEAD, London Business School, Oxford, RSM, SDA Bocconi, University of Geneva, University of St Gallen and VU Amsterdam.

More recently, he has become a Professor in Negotiation & Influencing. Giuseppe regularly runs workshops on four continents. To date, corporate leaders from multinational corporations and individuals from over 145 different countries have attended his workshops.

Giuseppe is an accomplished negotiator and integrates into his training over 25 years of executive-level experience at Blue Chip corporations (Procter & Gamble, Novartis, Firmenich, Merck).

His recent research and articles have focused on negotiating with no alternatives, influencing healthcare, gender differences in negotiation, managing internal and external negotiations, dealing with difficult people, and negotiating long-term business relationships.

Robert H. Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and for twenty-five years served as the Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. He directs the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. A leading scholar in the field of conflict resolution, Professor Mnookin has applied his interdisciplinary approach to negotiation and conflict resolution to a remarkable range of problems; both public and private.

A renowned teacher and lecturer, Professor Mnookin has taught numerous workshops for corporations, governmental agencies and law firms throughout the world and trained many executives and professionals in negotiation and mediation skills. On behalf of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, he designed and has taught annual workshops for intellectual property professionals. Professor Mnookin has served as a consultant to governments, international agencies, major corporations and law firms. As a neutral arbitrator or mediator, he has resolved numerous complex commercial disputes.

Professor Mnookin has written or edited ten books and numerous scholarly articles. His most recent books include Kissinger the Negotiator (with James K. Sebenius and R. Nicholas Burns); The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World (Public Affairs November 2018) and Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.

Erica Ariel Fox is the author of the New York Times best seller Winning From Within: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change. She teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School, where she began teaching in 1996. Erica is recognized internationally-as a thought leader who combines the deeply human aspects of negotiation with the best practices of leadership development. She is an advisor to senior leaders globally with her partners at Mobius Executive Leadership; serves as a Senior Advisor to McKinsey Leadership Development for McKinsey & Company; and also is a LinkedIn Influencer. Mixing nearly two decades of experience with business leaders and a personal touch, Erica brings a unique voice to the conversation about leading wisely and living well.

She lives with her husband and her step-son outside of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as well as outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her book has been translated into ten other languages, and was a New York Times Bestseller.

George J. Siedel is the Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration and the Thurnau Professor of Business Law at the University of Michigan. He teaches courses on negotiation, public policy, and business law at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He has also taught seminars around the world to business leaders, entrepreneurs, attorneys, judges, physicians, and athletic directors. In conjunction with his courses and seminars, he developed several free negotiation planning tools and a free app, which are available at http://www.negotiationplanner.com.

Professor Siedel completed graduate studies at the University of Michigan and Cambridge University. He served as a visiting professor at Stanford University and Harvard University and as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley. As a Fulbright Scholar, he held a Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Professor Siedel has received several national research awards, including the Maurer Award, the Ralph Bunche Award, and the Hoeber Award. He has also received many teaching awards, including 2014 and 2018 Executive Program Professor of the Year Awards from a consortium of 36 leading universities committed to international education. In 2018, he received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business.

Guhan Subramanian is the Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business at Harvard Law School, the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School, and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Program on Negotiation. He is the only person in the history of Harvard University to hold tenured appointments at both HLS and HBS. At HLS he teaches courses in negotiations and corporate law. At HBS he teaches in several executive education programs, such as Strategic Negotiations, Changing the Game, Managing Negotiators and the Deal Process, and Making Corporate Boards More Effective. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty he spent three years at McKinsey & Company in their New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. offices.

Professor Subramanian’s research explores topics in negotiations, corporate dealmaking, and deal process design. He has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and the Harvard Law Review, among other places. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column, the New York Times, the American Lawyer, The Deal, and Corporate Control Alert. His new book Negotiauctions: New Dealmaking Strategies for a Competitive Marketplace (Norton 2010) synthesizes the findings from his research and teaching over the past decade.

Professor Subramanian has been involved in major public-company deals such as Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $8.9 billion freeze-out of the minority shareholders in Cox Communications, the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us, and Exelon’s $8.0 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG. He also advises individuals, boards of directors, and management teams on issues of dealmaking and corporate governance.

Professor Subramanian holds degrees in Economics, Law, and Business, all from Harvard University. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Dr. Joshua N. Weiss is the co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project. He is also the Director and creator of the Master of Science degree in Leadership and Negotiation at Bay Path University. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in 2002.

Dr. Weiss has spoken and published on leadership, negotiation, mediation, and systemic approaches to dealing with conflict. In his current capacity he conducts research, consults with many different types of organizations, delivers negotiation and mediation trainings and courses, and engages in negotiation and mediation at the organizational, corporate, government, and international levels.

Dr. Weiss is the creator of a number of innovative products that use the power of present day technology to convey negotiation to a broad audience. In addition to teaching numerous synchronous and asynchronous courses and trainings over the web he has developed two products of note. The first is the Negotiation Tip of the Week (NTOW) podcast. The second is the Negotiator In You Audiobook and eBook series. The NTOW was in the top 100 iTunes Business Podcasts from 2007 to 2010 and was downloaded over 2 million times during that period. The Negotiator In You series was published in January 2012 and was in the iTunes top audiobook category for two months. An addition to the series, specifically for salespeople, was published in January of 2013.

Dr. Weiss’ most recent book, which is part of a storybook series for children to learn negotiation and conflict resolution skills, is called Phony Friends, Besties Again: The Continuing Adventures of Emo and Chickie. This is the final book in the trilogy, which also includes Bullied No More! The Continuing Adventures of Emo and Chickie, and Trouble at the Watering Hole: The Adventures of Emo and Chickie. The books are for 6 to 10 year olds.

Finally, Dr. Weiss has conducted trainings and consulted with a number of organizations, companies, and governmental entities, including: Microsoft, General Motors, United Auto Workers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Novellus, Christies Art Auction House, CDM Smith, Deloitte, Genzyme, Harvard University, Mass Mutual, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale Medical School, United Nations (Mediation Unit, UNAOC, UNITAR, and UNDP), Government of Canada, the US Government (State Department, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Park Service, and Transportation Security Administration), and various state governments.

For more than three decades, Herb Cohen has been a practicing negotiator, intimately enmeshed in some of the world’s headline dramas from hostile takeovers to hostage negotiations. His clients have included business executives, entrepreneurs, sports and theatrical agents plus large corporations – as well as governmental agencies, such as the Department of State, FBI, CIA, The US Conference of Mayors and US Department of Justice.

Unlike some theorists, he was actively involved in the negotiations that settled the NFL players’ strike and the General Motors Chevy mobile litigation and also participated in the START Arms Control Negotiations with the Soviet Union.

He started formally teaching the subject of negotiations during a two week course for attorneys in 1963 sponsored by Allstate Insurance Company. It was then he first used the terms “Win-Win. Win-Lose, Lose-Lose”.

Herb Cohen’s analysis, insights and humorous view of many of these high-level happenings have appeared in many international publications, and he himself has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, People, The Economist, The New Yorker, Esquire, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and even Playboy Magazine.

He is the author of You Can Negotiate Anything which was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost one year and has been translated into thirty languages. His latest book, Negotiate This! By Caring But Not T-H-A-T Much was published in mid-September 2003.

During the Cold War, Herb Cohen served with the U.S. Army, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment on the East-West Border in Bad Kissingen, Germany.

While attending university and law school he worked in many business and governmental organizations and ultimately became a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Business. Since then he has lectured at many educational institutions and enterprises such as The Harvard Negotiating Project, Yale Law School, The Kellogg School, Wharton, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California-San Diego, McGill University, UBC and the Columbia and Chicago University School of Business.

Alex is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School. She has spent the last eleven years helping thousands of people negotiate better, build relationships and reach their goals. In 2019, Alex was awarded the Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, Columbia University’s highest teaching honor.

Alex believes that negotiation is for everyone. She is a world-renowned negotiation trainer for groups and individuals from all over the world—including the United Nations, Fortune 100 companies, the U.S. government, foreign governments, not-for-profit organizations, universities and private law firms. Through the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School, Alex and her students provide free conflict resolution services and training to many people and organizations who otherwise would not be able to afford it.

Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Alex was associated with Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. She also worked at Goldman Sachs in the Principal Investment Area. She spent a year in Taipei, Taiwan as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar.

Alex received her Juris Doctor degree in 2003 from Columbia Law School, where she earned James Kent and Harlan Fiske Stone academic honors. She won the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for her mediation work and the Lawrence S. Greenbaum Prize for oral advocacy. She graduated cum laude from Georgetown University, where she won the Lena Landegger community service award.

Her first book, Ask for More: Ten Questions to Negotiate Anything, was published May 5th by Simon & Schuster and became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller — the first negotiation book solo-authored by a woman to make that list.

Alex lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with her husband Greg and their daughter Caroline. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and practicing yoga.

Deborah works with today’s top executives on the challenging issues of negotiation, leadership, and gender in ways that to secure wins for individuals and their organizations. Foremost authority in the fields of negotiation, leadership, and gender, she is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women in Leadership (Emerita) and co-founder of the Ford Foundation funded Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons College School of Management.

Deborah was Former Executive Director and is currently Co-Director of the Negotiations in the Workplace Project at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. She is a strategic advisor and mentor to many of today’s most successful executive women and also served as Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research in 2008-2009, and is Adjunct Faculty at INSEAD.

Kimberlyn Leary has taught courses and seminars on negotiation, clinical technique, and public policy and mental health. She has also served as a tutor to third-year medical students. She sits on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalytic Psychology, the Harvard Mental Health Letter, and Negotiation Journal. She is currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program and New America’s International Security Program, a senior advisor to the CEO at the National Math and Science Initiative, and a trustee of Amherst College.

In 1997, Leary published a paper on race and self-disclosure that won the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Karl Menninger Prize, and in 2007 she received the Ernest and Gertrude Ticho Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2010 she received the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychoanalysis award for clinical scholarship and was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow in 2014. From 2015 to 2016, she served as an advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls for one year, developing the “Advancing Equity” initiative for improving life outcomes for women and girls of color, and as an advisor to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Health Division.

Steve Gates is the founder and CEO of The Gap Partnership, the world’s leading negotiation consultancy. Founded in 1997, the company now has office worldwide. Steve and his team of negotiation consultants have advised and developed some of the world’s leading organizations with their most difficult negotiations, dealing with everything from retail trade terms to mergers and acquisitions, oil prices and trade union disputes.

Steve is the author of The Negotiation Book, this Book is an indispensable and practical guide for anyone who wants to improve their negotiation capability.

Speaker, Negotiator, Coach, Consultant

With over 30 years of experience working for the world’s largest companies and a passion for body language, Mary Redmond now shares her expertise at workshops, via webinars and through individual coaching sessions.

Mary can help you with everything from closing more sales to asking for a raise to knowing what other people are thinking. Greater confidence, self control and success are often the results of her teachings. Businesses come to Mary because she brings valuable negotiation lessons from experience, not books. Mary also negotiates complex financial contracts acting as the “secret weapon” for clients. Her unique negotiation techniques result in savings and cost reductions.

Stay 2 steps ahead of the competition and save money with an experienced negotiator! www.maryaredmond.com

Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration
www.people.hbs.edu/mbazerman

In addition to being the Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School, Max is formally affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government, the Psychology Department, and the Program on Negotiation.

Max’s research focuses on decision making in negotiation, and improving decision making in organizations, nations, and society. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eighteen books (including Negotiation Genius [with Deepak Malhotra], Bantam Books, September 2007) and over 200 research articles and chapters. He is a member of the editorial boards of the American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Management and Governance, Mind and Society, Negotiations and Conflict Management Research, and The Journal of Behavioral Finance. Also, he is a member of the international advisory board of the Negotiation Journal.

From 2002-2008, Max was consistently named one of the top 40 authors, speakers, and teachers of management by Executive Excellence. He was ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the Executive Masters Program of the Kellogg School. In 2003, Max received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, Max received an honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), the Kulp-Wright Book Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association for Predictable Surprises (with Michael Watkins), and the Life Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. In 2008, Max was named as Ethisphere’s 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics, was named one of Daily Kos’ Heroes from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco trial, received the International Institute of Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR) Outstanding Book Award, and received the Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management.
His former doctoral students have accepted positions at leading business schools throughout the United States, including the Kellogg School at Northwestern, the Fuqua School at Duke, the Johnson School at Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, Columbia, and the Harvard Business School.

An entrepreneur since the age of 21, Gino has had an obsession for learning what makes businesses and entrepreneurs thrive.

At 25 he took over the family business, which was deeply in debt and in need of help. After turning the company around and running it for seven years, he and his partners successfully sold the company.

Gino then set out to help entrepreneurs and leaders get what they want from their businesses.

Based on his years of real-world experience, he created the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®), a practical method for helping companies achieve greatness.

He has personally delivered more than 1,900 full-day sessions for more than 135 companies, helping them implement EOS. He is also the author of the award-winning, best-selling book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, which has sold over 1 million copies, as well as five other books in the Traction Library that have sold almost 2 million copies.

Gino is the founder of EOS Worldwide, an organization that helps thousands of businesses implement EOS with the aid of an international team of over 450 professional and certified EOS Implementers and online support. There are more than 130,000 companies using the EOS tools worldwide.

Saygin is the Founder & CEO of the Middle East’s (ME) first & largest car buying service, SellAnyCar.com and Founder of the first & largest online private shopping club in the ME, Sukar.com, which has been acquired by Souq.com, making him Partner at the Souq.com and Jabbar Internet Group, becoming the largest ecommerce company in the Arab world, with 3000+ employees. In its largest acquisition outside the US to date, Amazon.com has acquired Souq.com Group. He has been selected as a UBS Industry Leader, a network of Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals.

He was also Advisory Board Member & Academic Lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the Canadian University of Dubai.

He was referred to as “the region’s online business guru” by the National newspaper in the UAE, while Arabian Business named him as “one of the region’s finest young entrepreneurs and a major part of the entrepreneurial scene in recent years”.

Fortune magazine (mag) named him in the 40 under 40 list, as one of the most influential young people in business, Entrepreneur mag ME awarded SellAnyCar.com, with Saygin at its helm, as the “Fastest Growing Company in the ME”, while the National newspaper sees it among a handful of tech companies to “have the potential to break the $1bn barrier”. In a cover story, Entrepreneur mag ME titled him as “undoubtedly one of the youngest & most successful internet entrepreneurs in the ME”, awarded SellAnyCar.com as “Technology Innovator of the Year”, while Khaleej Times awarded him as the Technology Leader. Gulf Business selected him as 1 of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs in ME.

In a cover story, Arabian Business counts him as 1 of the most successful entrepreneurs to call Dubai home. During the World Government Summit, HH Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed, Minister of Interior of the UAE, presented Saygin as an inspiring story for the country, in the presence of world leaders, incl. HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Saygin regularly shares his knowledge and lifestyle as a speaker and public figure.

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and The New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is now available in 19 languages.

Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007, and was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL service. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications. He also served as vice president of Netscape’s widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. Before joining Netscape in July 1995, he held various senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation.

Ben has an MS in Computer Science from UCLA and a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Ben serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Caffeine, Capriza, Databricks, Foursquare, Genius, Lyft, Magnet Systems, Medium, NationBuilder, Okta, SignalFx, Sisu, Tanium, TripActions, United Masters, and Usermind. He is also on the board of CODE2040.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup, and has had plenty of startup failures along the way. He is a frequent speaker at business events, has advised a number of startups, large companies, and venture capital firms on business and product strategy, and is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs. He lives in San Francisco.

If you could ask only one person for advice about starting a company or joining a startup, chances are you’d pick John Doerr.

John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins.

For 37 years, John has served entrepreneurs with ingenuity and optimism, helping them build disruptive companies and bold teams. In 2018, he authored Measure What Matters, a handbook for setting and achieving audacious goals. Through his book and platform, WhatMatters.com, he shares valuable lessons from some of the most fearless innovators of our time.

John was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than half a million jobs and the world’s second and third most valuable companies. He’s passionate about encouraging leaders to reimagine the future, from transforming healthcare to advancing applications of machine learning. Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs for change in public education, the climate crisis, and global poverty. John serves on the board of the Obama Center and ONE.org.

Pat Flynn is a beloved thought leader in the areas of online entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and lifestyle businesses. He is routinely celebrated for his transparent leadership style and authentic principles. Pat overcame career adversity at an early age by finding his own path and true passion. Despite his success in business, Pat’s greatest joys are spending time with his family and friends as well as helping inspire and educate others on how to succeed with their own entrepreneurial careers.

Pat has been featured in The New York Times and Forbes Magazine for his accomplishments, and has recently been enjoying talking about his story and business strategies in front of large crowds at various conferences and events all around the world. His top-ranked business podcast, The Smart Passive Income Podcast, has earned over 25 million downloads and continues to inspire people as they work through their online business journey today.

Pat is also an advisor to Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building schools in the developing world, as well as companies such as LeadPages and ConvertKit.

Laura Gassner Otting helps people get “unstuck” — and achieve extraordinary results.

Through Limitless Possibility, Laura collaborates with change agents, entrepreneurs, investors, leaders, and donors to push past the doubt and indecision that consign great ideas to limbo. She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and catalytic perspective informed by decades of navigating change across the start-up, nonprofit, political, and philanthropic landscapes.

Laura’s 25-year resume is defined by her entrepreneurial edge. She served as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, helping shape AmeriCorps; left a leadership role at respected nonprofit search firm, Isaacson, Miller, to found and run (and eventually sell) an internationally successful executive search firm which partnered with the full gamut of mission driven nonprofit executives, from start-up dreamers to scaling social entrepreneurs to global philanthropists. She is most recently the author Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life, which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list, right behind Michelle Obama.

Through her own commitment to give back, Laura has helped build a local Montessori school, co-founded a women’s philanthropic initiative, advised a start-up national women’s PAC, grew a citizen-leadership development program, and completed three charity-inspired marathons—projects emblematic of her passions and values. She’s turned on by the audacity of The Big Idea and that larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake. She’s an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like.

One of the leading European experts in leadership, decision-making and talent management.

Pawel passionately combines these topics with the perspective of technology revolution and its impact on the effectiveness of organizations, teams and individuals. He is the only Pole in the Global Gurus’ ‘TOP30’: in March 2021 he was recognized as world’s no. 5 in Startups and world’s no. 16 in Organizational Culture categories.

His book, “Labyrinth. The Art of Decision-Making”, was published in Polish in 2015 and became Harvard Business Review Poland all-time bestseller in just 4 weeks. The book was published in English (2019), Russian, Chinese and Greek (2020). His latest book, “Schrödinger’s World: The Chronicle of an Unpredictable Future” was published in November 2020.

In 2016 he was selected from over 16,000 candidates for the elite global group of Marshall Goldsmith’s “100 Coaches” initiative, alongside people such as Dr. Jim Kim, former President of the World Bank, Alan Mulally, former president of the Ford Motor Corporation, Aicha Evans or David Peterson. In November 2019 Pawel was recognized as one of the Leading Global Coaches during Thinkers50 Gala in London.

Pawel completed Train-the-Trainer program at the McClelland Center in Boston (2005), and in 2015 he obtained an executive coach certificate at Stakeholder Centered Coaching. He has also completed The Executive Program at Singularity University in Silicon Valley in 2018 and ‘Minds and Machines’ course at MIT in 2021.

He is a valued inspirational speaker, consultant and advisor to the management boards of leading companies in Europe, North America and Asia, conducts numerous workshops and training programs for senior managers. He has delivered keynote speeches at conferences and conducted workshops with speakers such as Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, Prof. Dave Ulrich, Prof. Andrew McAfee, Neil Rackham, Prof. Joseph Badaracco, and Prof. Heike Bruch.

He worked for over eight years at the Hay Group consulting company, initially as a consultant, then as a leader in the Diagnostics team for Central and Eastern Europe. From 2007 to 2014 he was the CEO of the ICAN Institute, publisher of the Harvard Business Review Poland magazine.

Tom Kolditz is the founding Director, Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.

The Doerr Institute, Tom’s fifth successful leader development start up, was named top university leader development program by the Association of Leadership Educators and the #4 Leader Development Program worldwide by Global Gurus.

Prior to founding the Institute, Tom designed the Leader Development Program at the Yale School of Management and chaired the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point for 12 years.

Brigadier General Kolditz has more than 35 years in leadership positions on four continents, and received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s highest award for service.

He is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, and has published more than 75 articles and book chapters to date, including in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the proceedings of the World Economic Forum.

Tim Draper is the founding partner of Draper Associates and DFJ. Tim’s original suggestion to use viral marketing as a method for spreading a software application from customer to customer was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail, Skype, and others.

Tim has been recognized as a leading supporter of entrepreneurship with numerous awards and honors. He was listed as #46 of the most outstanding Harvard alumni, #7 on the Forbes Midas List, #1 of the Most Networked Venture Capitalists by Always On, and #98 in Worth Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful People in Finance. Tim also received the World Entrepreneurship Forum’s “Entrepreneur for the World” in 2015.

Tim received a BS from Stanford University with a major in electrical engineering and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

He served on the California State Board of Education in 1998-1999, and currently leads an initiative to create six new states in California (Six Californias) to encourage competition and choice in government.

In 1994, he created a non-profit for young children to learn about business and entrepreneurship called BizWorld. In 2011, he created Draper University of Heroes, a residential and online school to help extraordinary young people meet their entrepreneurial goals.

Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college he took his family wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years. Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Along the way he became a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Birchbox before eventually co-founding VaynerRSE, a $25M investment fund.

Gary also currently hosts The #AskGaryVee Show, a way of providing as much value as possible by taking questions about social media, entrepreneurship, startups, and family businesses and giving his answers based on a lifetime of building successful, multi-million dollar companies. The show is also available as a podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and SoundCloud.

Gary is also a prolific public speaker, delivering keynotes at events like Le Web, and SXSW, which you can watch on his YouTube channel.

He was named to both Fortune and Crain’s 40 under 40 lists in consecutive years, and has been profiled in the New York Times, Fortune, and Inc.

Jason Calacanis  is a technology entrepreneur, angel investor, and the host of the popular weekly podcast This Week in Startups. He’s the founder of a series of conferences that bring entrepreneurs together with potential investors.

As a “scout” for top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and later as an angel investor, Jason has invested in 150 early-stage startups including 4 that have achieved billion-dollar valuations (so far).

Jason’s book “Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups: Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000” was released by Harper Collins on July 18th, 2017. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Eight-time entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He’s changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Recognized as a thought leader on startups and innovation, Steve was named one of the Thinkers50 top management thinkers and recognized by the Harvard Business Review as one of 12 Masters of Innovation.

His Harvard Business Review cover story (May 2013) defined the Lean Startup movement.

He teaches his Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and NYU, among others; and created the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps that is now the standard for science commercialization in the U.S. His Hacking for Defense class at Stanford is revolutionizing how the U.S. defense and intelligence community deploys innovation with speed and urgency, and its sister class, Hacking for Diplomacy, is doing the same for foreign affairs challenges managed by the U.S. State Department.

A prolific writer and speaker, Steve blogs at www.steveblank.com. His articles regularly appear in Forbes, Fortune, The Atlantic and Huffington Post.

Giff Constable is an author, repeat entrepreneur, and product leader. Most recently, he served as the Chief Product Officer at Meetup. He has sold three companies while at the helm, and helped build many others. In 2020, he published the science fiction novel Becoming Monday. In 2014, he published the book Talking to Humans as a practical guide to customer discovery for aspiring entrepreneurs. The book went on to win a special award from the National Science Foundation and is now standard reading in university and accelerator programs around the world. In 2018, he and his collaborator Frank Rimalovski followed up with the sequel Testing with Humans, which is all about running effective experiments.

Prior to Meetup, Giff was VP of Product at fintech startup Axial, where he led product, pricing, design, engineering and content strategy. Prior to Axial, he was CEO of the global innovation consulting firm Neo, which was acquired by Pivotal. Neo built a globally-recognized brand for modern product strategy, development and design. Giff personally led major innovation projects at the Mayo Clinic and Time Inc, among others.

Going back further, there are more startups (Trilogy, Envive, The Electric Sheep Company, Aprizi) and even stints as an investment banker at Broadview / Jefferies.

He tries to give back to the startup and innovation community whenever possible, across writing, mentorship and events. He lives outside of New York City with his wife and two children.

Mike Michalowicz had founded and sold two multi-million dollar companies. Confident that he had the formula to success, he became an angel investor… and proceeded to lose his entire fortune.

Then he started all over again, driven to find better ways to grow healthy, strong companies. Among other innovative strategies, Mike created the “Profit First” formula, a simple and extremely effective ways for businesses to ensure profitability from their very next deposit forward.

Mike is now running his third million dollar venture, Profit First Professionals (an organization that certifies accountants and bookkeepers in Profit First methods that drive profitability for their clients), is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal; is the former MSNBC business make-over expert; is a popular keynote speaker on innovative entrepreneurial topics; and is the author of Clockwork, Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which BusinessWeek deemed “the entrepreneur’s cult classic.”

Mike is also a guest lecturer for collegiate entrepreneurial programs such as Babson, Boston College, Columbia, Copenhagen Business School, Emerson, Harvard, Penn State, Pepperdine and Princeton. His books are in the core curriculum for entrepreneur students at Pepperdine, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford University, and universities across the country. His books have been translated into over 10 languages.

Josh Kaufman is the author of three bestselling books: “The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business”, “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!”, and “How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be.”

Josh’s research focuses on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom.

Josh has been featured as the #1 bestselling author in Business & Money, as ranked by Amazon.com.

“The Personal MBA” has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Business Training and Business Management on Amazon.com. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and business reading list has been downloaded over 3 million times by readers around the world.

“The First 20 Hours” has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Business Self-Improvement, Educational Psychology, and Personal Transformation on Amazon.com. His TEDx talk on “The First 20 Hours” has been viewed over 12 million times worldwide, putting it in the top 10 most-viewed TEDx videos and top 100 most-viewed TED talks published to date.

“How to Fight a Hydra” has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Modern Philosophy on Amazon.com.

Josh’s research has been featured by The New York Times, The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Fortune, Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, Fast Company, Financial Times, HarvardBusiness.org, The World Economic Forum, Inside Higher Ed, Lifehacker, MarketWatch, The Independent, Bloomberg TV, PBS Next Avenue, CCTV, and CNN’s Sanjay Gupta MD.

Josh has been a featured speaker at The Aspen Ideas Festival, Stanford University, World Domination Summit, Pioneer Nation, Microconf, BaconBiz, Google, and IBM.

JoshKaufman.net was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Entrepreneurs” by Forbes in 2013.

Rhonda Abrams was born in Los Angeles, CA and earned degrees from both UCLA and Harvard. She has advised, mentored and consulted entrepreneurs and small business owners for over twenty years. Her knowledge of the small business market and her passion for entrepreneurship have made her one of America’s most recognized advocates for small business. Her weekly newspaper column, “Small Business Strategies,” is the nation’s most widely-read column about small business, reaching more than 20 million readers through 130 newspapers, USATODAY.com, Inc.com, and Costco Connection magazine.

Rhonda’s first book, Successful Business Plan: Secrets & Strategies, was acclaimed by Forbes magazine as one of the two best books for small business and by Inc. magazine as one of the six best books for startups. Now in its sixth edition, it is used as the primary text for business plan classes by over a thousand business schools.

John Zeratsky is a technology designer, startup investor, and the bestselling author of Sprint and Make Time.

John has focused his career on helping small teams build big things through customer-driven discovery and validation. He was an early employee at FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. At Google, he led design for AdWords Editor and DoubleClick Search, enterprise advertising products responsible for 60% of Google’s revenue. He joined YouTube in 2010 and designed the YouTube Channels platform.

At GV (Google Ventures), John and his team developed the Design Sprint process and personally supported many of GV’s most successful investments, including Slack, One Medical Group, Flatiron Health, Blue Bottle Coffee, Gusto, and Digit.

John has reached millions with his writing about resetting the defaults of busyness and distraction. He’s written two bestselling books and published articles in The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many other outlets.

John studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the UW School of Human Ecology, where he’s now an advisor to the Dean and faculty.

Originally from small-town Wisconsin, John has lived in Chicago and San Francisco with his wife Michelle. They spent 18 months traveling in Central America aboard their sailboat Pineapple before moving to Milwaukee in 2019.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behavior and the dynamics of viral businesses, as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive, “blitzscale” growth. Ranging from LinkedIn to PayPal, from Airbnb to Convoy to Facebook, Reid invests in businesses with network effects and collaborates on building their product ecosystems.

Reid co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in 2003. LinkedIn is thriving with more than 500 million members around the world and a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising, and software licensing. He led LinkedIn through its first four years and to profitability as Chief Executive Officer. In 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft, and Reid became a board member of Microsoft.

Michael E. Gerber is a true legend of entrepreneurship.

Inc. Magazine
 calls him “the World’s #1 Small Business Guru” — the entrepreneurial and small business thought leader who has impacted the lives of millions of individuals and hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide for over 40 years.

Michael E. Gerber is the author of the mega-bestseller “The E-Myth Revisited” and five other E-Myth books concerning small business and entrepreneurship.  Additionally, Mr. Gerber has written 14 industry-specific E-Myth Vertical books co-authored by industry experts.  These books are written for: Attorneys, Accountants, Optometrists, Chiropractors, Landscape Contractors, Financial Advisors, Architects, Real Estate Brokerages, Insurance Stores, Dentists, Nutritionists, Bookkeepers, Veterinarians, Real Estate Investors and soon to be HVAC Contractors.

Today, Michael is on a new mission, to bring economic development strengths and capabilities to millions of people around the world by awakening the new entrepreneur within them.  His one-of-a-kind entrepreneurial incubator called The Dreaming Room: Design, Build, Launch & Grow, is now being led throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. This program will soon be sponsored by cities throughout the United States, and soon in cities throughout the world.

Based on his intimate, in-depth experiences with entrepreneurs in his Dreaming Room events, along with the tens of thousands of clients his company has coached and mentored over the past 40 years, Michael E. Gerber has  authored his revolutionary new book on entrepreneurship and The Dreaming Room called: “Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies.”

Mr. Gerber believes that awakened entrepreneurs seek a path that has, at its core, a higher, more inspiring meaning than just making money, selling a product, or seizing market share.  According to Mr. Gerber, a new entrepreneur is a trailblazer seeking to transform lives in all areas – from designing a small business, building it, launching it and growing it.

As a result of a participant’s experience in The Dreaming Room: Design, Build, Launch & Grow the evolving entrepreneurs within will discover the means to create a new company, or transform an old one, while going on to work ON his or her business and life, rather than just IN it — unfailingly reflecting his or her transformational resolve into the actions needed for a company to flourish.

Michael and his wife, Luz Delia, live in Carlsbad, California.

Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars.

In addition to his investing efforts, Brad has been active with several non-profit organizations. He currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and on the boards of Path Forward, the Kauffman Fellows, and Defy Ventures.

Brad is a writer and speaker on the topics of venture capital investing and entrepreneurship. He’s written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution series and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals.

Brad holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Management Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brad is also an art collector and long-distance runner. He has completed 24 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 states.

Stephen R. Poland has worked with hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs, mentoring them on startup mechanics, funding plans, pitch decks, financial models, and due diligence documentation for the angel funding process.

Steve brings more than 20 years’ experience in startups and entrepreneurship to his career. Leveraging leadership roles with the Walt Disney Company, MacMillan Publishing, and Bertelsmann, Steve co-founded startups in the digital music and on-demand media manufacturing sectors, as well an early days anti-virus product.

Along with being co-founder of 1×1 Media, Steve works as a venture growth advisor in Western North Carolina.

Jeff Walker has literally transformed the way stuff is sold online. Along the way he’s become one of the top entrepreneurial and marketing trainers in the world. But it didn’t start out that way…

When Jeff started his first online business, he was a stay-at-home dad taking care of two small children. The “business” was launched from the baby’s changing room – and it started with a free email newsletter sent to 19 people. That was in the Internet Dark Ages of 1996.

After that humble start, Jeff quickly developed an underground process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success.

But the success-train was just getting started – once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking. Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in sales with their launches.

Back in the old days before he started teaching his “Product Launch Formula”,
almost no one in the online entrepreneurial world talked about “product launches” and the idea of a “million dollar day” seemed almost ludicrous. But now, in the post-Product Launch Formula world, the million dollar (and multi- million dollar) launches hardly raise an eyebrow. They’ve almost become routine.

Of course, Jeff’s techniques are not just for big gurus — he’s taught thousands of students (who operate in hundreds of niches), and they’ve generated more than $500 million in sales (and that number grows every day.)

Jeff lives in Durango, Colorado where he pursues his passions for all kinds of outdoor fun. He lives with his wife Mary and their dog Jenny. And even though the children are out of the house, Jeff still has lots of adventures with them (especially on skis and mountain bikes).