The Transition:

You did work for and with the police for many years, how did you get started with Executive training?

The bridge into executive and corporate work was really by accident. I was contacted by a former high school friend who had become a human resource director at CitiBank, he asked whether I could perhaps facilitate an offsite team-building session. I went to New York and meet with the president of a division of CitiBank and his direct reports and during that process it became obvious that he was distracted by some other problem that the business was having. He came into the room and apologized profusely for the interruptions and mentioned that he was involved in a multi million dollar negotiation. He poked his head back in and looked at me and said "wait a minute , didn't I hear that you are an expert on negotiations?" and I replied to him that I was really just an expert on hostage negotiations and I had never done any financial negotiations, -whatsoever. In fact I didn't even know how to balance my check book, and that was literally true, and is actually true today. But he mentioned that he in fact felt that he was being held hostage by the other party in the negotiation, and would I assist him as best as I could? I agreed to do that and I went to his office and spend about two and a half hours talking about the problem, -about the situation and the individuals that he was dealing with, and he came and reported to me the next day and told me that all the things I had advised him to try, had worked very well, they were very effective. Over the course of about three weeks we talked a number of times, it finally culminated in a callabout three weeks after the original meeting in which he called me and said: " Harvey, I believe you have saved me seventeen million dollars" and of course, me being a government psychologist at the time, pulling in about 30.000 a year, I hesitantly asked him if I was going to get anything. He said he couldn't get me a piece of the deal. But he would hire me to train his executives in these negotiation techniques, and that's what I did for the next seven years.

When was this?

Approximately 1983 I believe.