Written to help professionals, parents, teachers, government officials, corporations and communities, Difficult Conversations offers a concrete, step-by-step approach to preparing for and conducting your most challenging conversations.

The authors and their associates offer training, consulting, and intervention services through two organizations:

Bruce Patton and his colleagues at Vantage Partners help organizations improve their capacity to negotiate, build, and manage their critical internal and external relationships.

Vantage consulting is specifically focused on helping its clients:

• manage the thorny relationship issues involved in making alliances succeed and evolve, and to build the organizational capacity to do so consistently.
  
  
• increase organizational returns on the wide range of negotiations in which they engage daily, with suppliers, customers, and partners.
  
  
• build the capacity to manage cross-functional and cross-divisional conflict in order to "make the matrix work."

Vantage training provides customized training on a variety of relationship management challenges. Two and three day courses include "Difficult Conversations", "Effective Negotiation Skills" (based on the international best seller Getting to Yes, of which Bruce Patton is a co-author), and "Conflict Management."

For more information, please visit the Vantage web site, or call us at: 617-354-6090.

Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen, and their colleagues at Triad Consulting Group, Inc. specialize in helping clients navigate complex communication challenges where important values are at stake and emotions run high. Whether it's working with managers to address performance issues, implement change in corporate culture, or negotiate outsourcing relationships and strategic partnerships, Triad can help.

Triad works with corporations, universities, non-profit groups, communities, governments, and families. We work closely with our clients to design an approach that fits the challenges they face and the constraints they are under.

Triad offers a variety of services, including:

• Customized workshops on leadership, negotiation, and difficult conversations
  
  
• Speeches at annual retreats and conferences
  
  
• Executive and team coaching
  
  
• Strategic negotiation advice
  
  
• Facilitation & mediation assistance
  
  
• Open workshops through Harvard Law School