Bob Bordone
Senior Fellow, Harvard Law School; Founder & Principal, The Cambridge Negotiation Institute
- Former Harvard Law School Professor, long-time educator, & consultant, and one of the world’s Top 30 Negotiation Professionals, equipping leaders to transform conflict and negotiation into opportunity and measurable results.
- Draws on 20+ years at Harvard, where he founded and led Harvard Law School’s Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program, to share world-class expertise.
- Trusted by organizations like Microsoft, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and the U.S. Department of Justice to navigate high-stakes disputes and to advise on complex deal-making.
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About Bob Bordone
Download ProfileRobert C. Bordone (Bob) is an internationally-recognized expert, author, speaker, and teacher in negotiation, conflict resolution, mediation, and facilitation, recently selected as one of the Top 30 Negotiation Professionals by Top Global Gurus. A Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, and the USA Today best selling author of Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In (HarperCollins 2025), he served on the full-time faculty at Harvard Law School for more than twenty years as the Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law, Director, and Founder of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program before launching his full-time consulting, advisory, speaking, and training practice. He also serves as the Director of the Consensus Building Institute Professional Development Academy and as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Bob has has also been a Visiting Clinical Professor of Conflict Transformation at Boston University’s School of Theology.
As a professional facilitator, mediator, and conflict management consultant, Bob works with individual, non-profit, governmental, and corporate clients across many sectors. He specializes in assisting individuals and groups seeking to manage conflicts in highly sensitive, emotional, or difficult situations. His corporate clients have included Premera Blue Cross, Health Net, Gap, Inc., Fidelity Investments, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Exelon, Heineken, and Microsoft. In addition, he has worked on projects with many nonprofit, educational, governmental and cultural institutions including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Massachusetts General Hospital, Dartmouth College, Deerfield Academy, the Swiss Foreign Ministry, the U.S. Department of Justice, the United Way, the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Seeds of Peace, and the Vienna School of Economics and Business Administration.
Bob is the recipient of many awards for teaching, research, and innovation. These include The Albert Sacks-Paul Freund Teaching Award at Harvard Law School, presented annually to a single member of the Harvard Law School faculty for teaching excellence, mentorship of students, and general contributions to the life of the Law School. The International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution’s (CPR) awarded Bob its Problem Solving in the Law School Curriculum Award for his innovative work in creating and building the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. Four graduating classes of Harvard Law School selected him to deliver a Last Lecture prior to their graduation, a recognition reserved for only four faculty members each year.
Bob is co-author of three books, including the USA Today Bestselling Book, Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In (HarperCollins 2025 as well as Designing Systems and Processes for Managing Disputes, 2d. Edition (Wolters-Kluwer, 2019) and The Handbook of Dispute Resolution (Jossey-Bass, 2005).
His research and writing interests include the assessment, reform, design, and implementation of dispute handling systems and developing and testing methods of effective public dialogue on issues that cut to the core of identity, meaning, belonging, and belief.
As part of this work on healthy dialogue, Bob has teamed with a media company called The Disagreement that fosters engaging and respectful conversation across lines of difference.
He has also published articles in leading business and dispute resolution journals including the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Law Review, the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, the Journal of Dispute Resolution, Negotiation Briefings, Dispute Resolution Magazine, and Negotiation Journal. Bob’s writing and commentary have appeared in various print and broadcast media outlets including NBC News, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, America, The Chicago Tribune, CNN’s Situation Room, and BBC Radio.
Speech Topics
Download TopicsLeading with Conflict Resilience. What if instead of avoiding or minimizing conflict, we embraced it as a way to build connection & build more creative and healthy workplaces, organizations, and families? Conflict Resilience — the ability to sit with the discomfort of our disagreements, to listen deeply, and to assert authentically — is a critical leadership skill. By building up our capacity to sit with conflict we open up possibilities of engaging the most fraught and emotionally challenging of conflicts in ways that build trust, prevent dehumanization, and lead to common ground. This talk will discuss both what is happening in our brains while we are in conflict as well as specific, evidence-based at-the-table strategies for how to engage others in the toughest conflicts in our lives. In our increasingly divided world, audience members will acquire specific tools for reframing how they approach and handle conflict at work and home.
Common Habits of the Merely Effective Negotiator. If you have ever tried to influence anyone to do anything, you negotiate. Despite the pervasiveness of this human activity, most of us have had no professional development on how to negotiate well. Even worse — most of us consciously engage in behaviors that actually limitˆour ability to be great negotiators — forcing us, at best, to be merely effective. In this talk, Bob will identify some of the common “habits” or “errors” that even sophisticated businesspeople make when negotiating with others. He’ll combine interactive exercises with the latest interdisciplinary research to open your eyes to how you can be your best whenever you influence other people.
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