Hello, old friends

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.”

– John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, January 20, 1961

 

Shared values help make lasting partnerships.

Yesterday at our weekly internal collaboration call, we welcomed our old friends Grande Lum and Heather Meeker Green.  They began working with us around 1999 as our thought leader partners and co-founders at Accordence, whose longtime greatest hit and flagship program is Just Negotiate®. An experience based on Lum’s definitive publication The Negotiation Fieldbook, Just Negotiate® helps participants learn a framework for generating innovative solutions to challenging situations and relationships.

Grande is a renowned expert in negotiation. His skills in that arena took him away from Accordence and into some astonishing new directions over the years, including work with the Harvard Negotiation Project and a stint as director of the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service, for which he was nominated by President Obama and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate.

He has more recently returned to a senior advisor role at Accordence, and he will be refreshing his classic book with a third edition that addresses new complexities and strategies for negotiation being brought about by email, text, chat, and even artificial intelligence.

Heather, herself an accomplished facilitator, mediator, and communicator, brings 30+ years of experience in the world of negotiation, communication, and personal effectiveness. While she has kept the Accordence ship at full sail while Grande was away, we’re happy to see Heather and Grande working together again as a truly dynamic duo.

One of the things Grande and Heather stressed in our call on Monday, is that our relationship began as one built on shared values of trust, collaboration, and abundance, values we both always also bring with us to our clients. With Accordence, we have delivered successful negotiation initiatives at dozens of global organizations, among them some of the first virtual workshops accommodating a global audience before the pandemic made that kind of flexibility a necessity.

Reach out to your Advantage partner or contact us to learn more about what we can bring to you through our partnership with Accordence, and how improving the negotiation skills among your leaders, sales teams, and even individual contributors, will produce a positive impact on your organization.

When the stakes are high, your ability to negotiate a successful outcome will depend on your readiness. Be prepared or get a head start by tapping into our lasting partnership with Accordence.

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Check it out! Grande Lum will be facilitating an open live online program at Stanford, Negotiation Mastery: Achieve Outstanding Results and Relationships, April 14-15.

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