PON Live! Roger Fisher Speaker Series

About the talk:

Who was Roger Fisher? In this, the inaugural Roger Fisher Speaker Series event, we will explore how Roger’s experiences in WWII drove him – alongside contemporaries Howard Raiffa, Thomas Schelling, Frank Sander and others — to find better ways for us to manage our differences. We’ll take a look at the tools they developed for joint learning and innovation through the “devising seminar” and the ways they tested out and refined ideas over time, aiming to create “theory for practitioners” that is simple enough to be useful, without being simplistic. Attendees will walk away with new insights into the origins of Getting to YES and the ongoing negotiation work at Harvard, as well as fresh ideas and approaches for pushing forward their own theory-building, writing, and approach to helping others manage conflict.

The Roger Fisher Speaker Series seeks to elevate and learn from leaders, writers, and thinkers doing innovative work in the field of conflict resolution and negotiation. With a focus on practical approaches to managing differences, the series seeks to bring together those interested in learning from others’ experiences and continuing to build our collective toolbox for managing conflict among those who share our planet.

Moderator Sheila Heen will be joined by Roger Fisher’s longtime collaborator and co-author on “Getting to YES”, Bruce Patton, as well as inaugural Harvard Law School Fisher Fellow, Dr. Baba Jallow, of Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission, and Roger Fisher’s son Peter Fisher, former US Undersecretary of the Treasury and currently at BlackRock, Inc.

About the speakers:

 Peter Fisher is the son of Roger and Caroline Fisher and a member of the HLS Class of 1985. After HLS, Fisher worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1985-2001), served as Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (2001-2003), worked at BlackRock Financial Management (2004-2013), taught at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (2014-2021), and now is working again at BlackRock, Inc.

Baba Jallow is the Inaugural Roger D Fisher Fellow in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Harvard Law School. Prior to this appointment, Jallow served as Executive Secretary of The Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (2018-2022), and taught African history at La Salle University (2015 – 2017) and Creighton University (2011-2015).

Jallow received a Ph. D. in African history from the University of California at Davis (2011) and a Masters in Liberal Studies from Rutgers University, Camden (2005). His research interests include colonial and post-colonial African history, transitional justice, and negotiation and conflict resolution.

His most recent representative works include The Prison Letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah (2020), Defying Dictatorship (2017) and The Catholic Voice in Ghana (2015)

Bruce Patton cofounded the Harvard Negotiation Project in 1979 with Professor Roger Fisher and William Ury to improve the theory and practice of negotiation and conflict management. He is also cofounder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and management consulting firm Vantage Partners, LLC. Since 1980 Patton has pioneered teaching negotiation to students, executives, military officers, and diplomats. More recently, he has focused on organizational transformation. Patton has helped test and develop theories of practice through work on numerous complex, public conflicts. He has assisted with the creation of the framework of principles that governed the ultimate resolution of the U.S.-Iranian hostage conflict, in Central America, helping President Oscar Arias make the Esquipulas II peace agreement self-implementing and in 1990-92 advising all parties in South Africa and training the facilitation team for the constitutional talks that led to the end of apartheid. A graduate of Harvard College (1977) and Harvard Law School (1984), Patton is a co-author of Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In and Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. Today he is a co-founder and principal of the Rebuild Congress Initiative, co-sponsored by the Harvard Negotiation Project and Issue One, which is working to build consensus on how to foster a strong, functional, and representative U.S. Congress and a resilient American democracy.

Sheila Heen is the Thaddeus R. Beal Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School, a Founder of Triad Consulting, and a Deputy Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. She has spent the last 30 years developing theory for practitioners, and learning from students, readers, and clients who have generously shared their own challenges, self-doubt, and (occasionally) doubt about Heen’s advice. Heen teaches the HLS Negotiation Workshop, as well as an Advanced Course called “Money, Negotiation and You,” and in the Program on Negotiation’s Master Class. She is co-author of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, has written for the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the Negotiation Journal. Sheen has been featured on Oprah, CNBC’s Power Lunch, the Tim Ferriss Show, Hidden Brain, Shane Parrish’s Knowledge Project, and has spoken at the Smithsonian, Google, Apple, the Global Leadership Summit, and the Nordic Forum. She is a graduate of Occidental College and Harvard Law School, and gets schooled in negotiation regularly by her three children.