Veterans Day Masterclass: Leadership, Service, and the Conversations That Shape Us

Negotiate Anything

American Negotiation Institute

Education, Business, Self-improvement

4.7 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In honor of Veterans Day, we bring you a special three-part masterclass celebrating the power of service, courage, and communication. Each guest — a distinguished leader shaped by the military experience — reveals a different side of what it means to lead and connect in complex times. Dr. Heiss Gibson explores humility and trust in the age of artificial intelligence, showing why the best leaders never stop learning. Michèle Flournoy takes us inside the rooms where history was made, from the Bin Laden raid to the cultural transformation of the Pentagon, revealing how strategy and empathy coexist under pressure. Finally, Brian Ahearn shares a deeply personal journey of reconciliation with his father, a Vietnam veteran, proving that influence and healing often begin with one honest conversation. Together, these stories remind us that true leadership isn’t about rank or power — it’s about service, humanity, and the conversations that move us forward. The One Thing Smart Leaders Miss About AI: Professor Hise Gibson — Retired U.S. Army Colonel & Professor at Harvard Business School High Stakes Negotiation: How to Win With Persuasion with Michèle Flournoy -Former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Brian Ahearn: The Hard Talks We Avoid—And Why We Need Them Brian Ahearn — Chief Influence Officer at Influence PEOPLE & Author of His Story, My Story, Our Story

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this negotiation masterclass edition of Negotiate Anything.
0:04.2	With over 1,600 episodes featuring some of the world's brightest minds,
0:08.0	we've carefully curated three powerful conversations for you.
0:12.1	What makes this so special is that you'll hear how different experts from different industries
0:16.5	approach the same challenge in their own unique ways.
0:20.4	Our goal is to give you multiple perspectives so you can build their own unique ways. Our goal is to give you multiple perspectives
0:22.5	so you can build your own unique style. Success doesn't look the same for everyone, and in this
0:27.8	masterclass you will see exactly why. Let's dive in. All right, everybody, we have a treat today. We have
0:35.2	Dr. and Professor Heis Gibson, who's also a retired colonel in the
0:40.1	military. So, Professor Gibson, thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate it.
0:44.0	No, thank you for having me. I'm excited about the conversation. Yes, likewise. So how would you
0:48.4	get it started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do? Another problem. And so I
0:52.4	think that thread, the bomb on in front is
0:55.2	service is a part of my background, having served the nation for a quarter of a century. And then
1:00.5	during that time, I had the opportunity to serve the next generation by teaching at West Point
1:05.5	a couple of times, which leads me to what I'm doing now at the Harvard Business School as a professor,
1:16.8	teaching the world's amazing future leaders and then also some of the world's most amazing executives.
1:27.7	And so serve as a high point. And then I really focus on what I would call operational leadership because I really care a lot about people, how we manage to think about talent development processes,
1:33.1	because everything's a process. And big ideas are amazing, but if you don't have anyone who actually do things, we're kind of a challenge. And then understanding in the current environment,
1:37.4	because we're operating in a volatile and certain complex and the biggest environment,
1:41.4	Bucca environment, technology integration is massively important.
1:45.6	Not only how do we integrate what I would call the new hotness, but are our people internally
	...

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