The world's leading forum for negotiations

Contribution: Keynote speech
Utilizing Tactical Empathy to influence and uncover hidden information

Chris is known as “The Master Negotiator”. A title earned throughout his time serving as the lead Crisis Negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI, and then as the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI where he helped develop the skills still used today across FBI hostage negotiators. He proceeded to teach business negotiation at USC, Georgetown, and Harvard business schools. 

In May 2016, he published the national best-seller “Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” to teach people everywhere how to apply life-changing hostage negotiation techniques in their daily lives. 

Watch the introduction video.

Anders was the negotiator for Denmark on the Maastricht Treaty. As Denmark’s Prime Minister he subsequently negotiated the EU Treaties, and as the NATO Secretary General he was involved in the negotiations around the crises in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Somalia, and Libya.

He knows how to deal with challenges – his new strategic concepts for a European structure encountered strong opposition at the time.  Whatever the challenge, he has demonstrated consistency and strategic negotiation skills, particularly with his approach to Russia.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen currently works on uniting democratic nations and implementing free-trade zones. He is certainly one of the most experienced negotiation professionals at the highest level.

Contribution: Keynote Speech
Role of Emotions in High-Stake Negotiations

Daniel Shapiro teaches a highly evaluated course on negotiation at Harvard College, instructs psychology interns at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital, and leads executive education sessions at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

He is the author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, which Matthew Bishop of the Economist Group called “quite simply, the best book I have ever read on negotiating in extreme conflict.”  He is also co-author with Roger Fisher of the negotiation classic “Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.”

Named among the top 15 professors at Harvard University, Shapiro specializes in practice-based research—building theory and testing it in real-world contexts.

Contribution: Keynote speech
Conducting business and negotiations across cultures

Erin Meyer is the author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business and co-author with Reed Hastings of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention.

She is a Professor at INSEAD, one of the world's leading international business schools. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes.com. In 2021, Erin was selected - for the third time - by the Thinkers50 as one of the fifty most influential business thinkers in the world.

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William Ury is an American author, academic, anthropologist, and negotiation expert. He is co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and author of Getting to Yes , a fifteen-million-copy bestseller translated into over thirty-five languages, and many other books on negotiation. Over the past four decades, Ury has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from boardroom battles to labor strikes to the Cold War, the Colombian civil war, and most recently Ukraine.

He has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats and military officers around the world. Ury was educated in Switzerland and received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard.

Contribution: Keynote Speech
Leading High-Stake Negotiations

“Matthias Schranner is one of the best negotiators worldwide”
– Forbes

Negotiation expert Matthias Schranner was originally trained by the police and the FBI as a lead negotiator for high-stakes situations. For the past 20 years, he and his team at the Schranner Negotiation Institute have been advising clients including the UN, global corporations and political parties in difficult negotiations. His proprietary Schranner Concept® is used by numerous Fortune 500 companies worldwide to succeed in difficult negotiations.

Baroness Catherine Ashton was the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, as well as the European Union common Foreign Minister, and thus the European Union principal negotiator.

She negotiated the rapprochement between the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Kosovo and furthermore, the transitional agreement in the nuclear arms dispute with Iran.

She understands the possibilities and limitations within the field of diplomacy and she knows how negotiations of the future will have to be conducted.

David Petraeus was the Director of the CIA and Commander of the U.S. Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He selected, led, and controlled teams during war times. Petraeus played a major role in developing the new focus of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Today, he serves as chairman of the KKR Global Institute and acts as a political and business advisor.

Dr. Santiago Calatrava is one of the world’s most influential architects. Currently working on building the world’s tallest tower in Dubai, the Swiss-Spanish architect is recognized for his iconic, sculptural buildings such as the World Trade Center station in New York, the Olympic Sports Complex in Athens and the University of Zurich Law School’s library.

Calatrava puts emphasis on the fact that he is not only an architect and an engineer, but also an artist. He is known for his futuristic structures and forms that are often inspired by living organisms. His design of Zurich’s Stadelhofen railway station was the starting point of his international career. Calatrava’s designs suggest stylized natural objects—waves, wings, or sun-bleached skeletons, with rows of white concrete ribs curved into distorted parabolic arches.

After his PhD in Engineering from ETH Zurich, Calatrava received numerous honorary doctors from international universities, including those of Tel Aviv, Mexico City, Lima, Liège, Madrid, Atlanta, and Columbia University. In 2004, Calatrava was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects.

Contribution: Fireside Chat
Showdown - creating a storyline to control the message and own the room 

Camille Vasquez is an NBC News Legal Analyst, most famous for her key role in the Johnny Depp defamation trial. A skilled litigator and now partner at Brown Rudnick, Vasquez is sought after for her key insights and perspective on today’s most high-profile legal cases, staying calm under pressure and protecting one’s brand and reputation.

A rising star even before she joined Brown Rudnick, Camille was named “One to Watch” by Best Lawyers in America for 2021-22. She has extensive experience handling reputation management and crisis communications, and more than 10 years of experience as a trial lawyer in high-stakes disputes.

Watch the introduction video.

Contribution: Keynote speech
Negotiation and conflict resolution -the stories we tell

Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida, is a Facilitator, Educator, Mediator and Executive Coach, who partners with clients to develop initiatives that will strengthen their core negotiation skills and effectiveness. She is President and CEO of Fisher Yoshida International, LLC, and clients have included global organizations in the Fortune 100, private sector, nonprofit and government sectors, military and security forces, communities, school districts and academic institutions.

Contribution: Keynote Speech
The role of negotiation in high-performing teams

Prof. George Kohlrieser negotiated in more than 100 Kidnappings and hostage-takings worldwide. He is a police psychologist and hostage negotiator focusing on aggression management and hostage negotiations.

He is a consultant to a number of governments, expert for CNN and the BBC, bestselling author, and the Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD Business School in Switzerland.

Contribution: Keynote Speech
Mastering the six disciplines of strategic thinking in negotiations

Michael D. Watkins, PhD, a globally recognized expert in the field of leadership. Over his career, he has designed and led world class programs at IMD, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School. He is a Thinkers 50-ranked management influencer (2019 to present) and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2023, in recognition of his remarkable contributions to the field of management thinking. Watkins was a member of the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. While there, he began to teach negotiation to senior leaders in the national security community.

These experiences led him to co-author "Breakthrough International Negotiation," which combines the diplomacy case studies and analysis, and which won the CPR Institute’s Prize for best book in the field of negotiation in 2001.

Michael is best known for his global bestseller, "The First 90 Days," the classic reference for leaders in transition, which has sold 2 million copies and is translated in 27 languages.

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Richard Quest is CNN’s foremost international business correspondent and anchor of Quest Means Business, the definitive word on how we earn and spend our money. Based in New York, he is one of the most instantly recognizable members of the CNN team.

Quest also serves as CNN Business editor-at-large and often hosts the digital live financial show “Markets Now.”

At our conference he talks about negotiations in business and trends that leaders need to prepare for.

Jennifer Jordan is a social psychologist and is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at IMD.

Professor Jordan's teaching, research, and consulting focus on the areas of digital leadership, ethics, influence, and power. Professor Jordan has received specialized training and certifications in lie- and truthfulness-detection, as well as in conflict resolution within organizations.

Professor Jordan received her doctoral degree and two masters degrees (Masters of Philosophy and Masters of Science in Psychology) from Yale University. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Leadership Quarterly and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Contribution: Fireside Chat

Peace Negotiations

Oleksandra Matviichuk is a human rights defender who works on issues in Ukraine and the OSCE region. At present she heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, and also coordinates the work ofthe initiative group Euromaidan SOS. The activities of the Center for Civil Liberties are aimed at protecting human rights and establishing democracy in Ukraine and the OSCE region.

After the beginning of new armed aggressionin February 2022, Oleksandra Matviichuk together with other partners created the “Tribunal for Putin” initiative in order to document international crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in all regions of Ukraine which became the targets of attacks of the Russian Federation.

In 2022 Oleksandra Matviichuk was awarded with the Right Livelihood Award and recognized as one of the 25th influential women in the world by Financial Times. The same year Center for Civil Liberties which Oleksandra Matviichuk head’s for received the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Phil Andrew served 21 years as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) throughout the U.S. and overseas with expertise in violence prevention, counter-terrorism, intelligence, crisis management and hostage negotiation, crimes against children, undercover work, behavioral analysis, and investigative work. He has led complex investigations and deployed regularly on domestic and international kidnappings and hostage-takings and has received numerous FBI and US Department of Justice awards.

He serves as an instructor at the FBI Academy and as an expert in crisis management, negotiation, behavior analysis and undercover work. Phil has keynoted, consulted and trained clients globally. In addition to that, Phil is an Adjunct Instructor of negotiation, business intelligence, leadership, and ethics at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business and Department of Management & Entrepreneurship.

Wolfgang Ischinger is mainly known as the director of the Munich Security Conference. On behalf of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) he drafted and led the negotiations on Eastern Ukraine.