Douglas Stone

Doug is a co-founder of Triad Consulting Group and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he has taught for over 30 years.

Through Triad, he has consulted to a wide range of organizations, and has lectured at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Pixar. He has worked with journalists in South Africa, diplomats at the former Organization of African Unity, police and community leaders in Springfield, MA, and doctors at UN/AIDS and W.H.O. He has also worked with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, Teach for America, the Ford Foundation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the White House. Doug has taught difficult conversations for the justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as well as for 80 Federal District Court Judges.

He is a co-author of Difficult Conversations (3d ed. 2023), which has been translated into 25 languages and is a New York Times bestseller. He is also co-author of New York Times bestseller Thanks for the Feedback (2014). His articles on negotiation and conflict management have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. In 1999, he and his co-author Sheila Heen were on Oprah.

Doug graduated from Brown in 1980 and Harvard Law School in 1984. Prior to returning to Harvard, he practiced transactional and regulatory banking law at firms in Boston and New York. From 1989 through 1999, he worked with Roger Fisher, Bob Mnookin, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, and others developing negotiation theory for practitioners at the Program on Negotiation and the Harvard Negotiation Project.