Author
Bruce Patton
The co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project who took its method into the hardest conversations of ordinary life.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Bruce Patton co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project with Roger Fisher and taught negotiation at Harvard Law School for many years. He joined Getting to Yes as co-author from its second edition, and went on to co-found Vantage Partners, a consultancy that brought the same method into corporate relationships and alliances.
Difficult Conversations, written with Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen in 1999, applied a decade of that teaching to the conversations people dread most: the raise, the breakup, the feedback nobody wants to give. Its idea that every hard conversation is really three at once has become standard in management and coaching.
The signature
Patton's signature is structure. Where others offer tactics, he maps the anatomy of a conversation, what happened, how each side feels, what it says about who they are, so that a person can see which of the three they are actually stuck in. The method is patient and even-handed, and it assumes both sides contributed to the mess.