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Stephen Hartley-Brewer worked extensively in the financial investment and consulting sectors before establishing The Negotiation Skills Group to provide high level negotiation skills training and advice on the planning and conduct of major negotiations.
In July 2015 his firm merged with Hartley-Brewer Negotiation Consultants and Stephen now runs the combined business.
A highly effective trainer and an experienced consultant, he also has strong financial knowledge and skills which are particularly useful when working with clients in the financial services sector.
Stephen has worked with clients in sectors ranging from investment banking and private equity to mezzanine finance, law firms and business services.
After graduating with a First in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, he joined The Boston Consulting Group, one of the world’s top consulting firms, where he advised clients in sectors ranging from financial services to retail.
He then moved into finance. While working at blue-chip private equity and hedge funds including BC Partners and TPG-Axon, his negotiation experience covered advisory mandates, financial covenants, distressed debt restructurings, private equity investments, take-privates and litigation.
Having enjoyed negotiating far more than staring at stock prices on a Bloomberg screen or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, he retired from the markets to establish his own firm specialising in high level negotiation skills development. In doing this he is drawing on a lifetime of lessons from watching and listening to his father Mike Hartley-Brewer who, until his retirement in 2010, was widely regarded as the world’s best trainer and consultant in the field of negotiation.
In his spare time Stephen enjoys playing in poker tournaments, scuba diving and skiing, and is an international level freediver.
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The Monkey is one of the vivid images we use in our training to make a key concept memorable. This image in particular has become a totem for our firm: a toy monkey attends every course, and the BBC made a documentary about us titled The Monkey Man.
A “monkey on your back” is a problem you have – in negotiation terms, that makes you want a deal even on bad terms. E.g. you’re under time pressure / you don’t have any other offers / you think the quality of the other offers is poor.
Monkeys lead most negotiators to underestimate their own relative power and so negotiate too ‘chicken’. And there is a structural reason for this error. – When you look at your own situation you are only too aware of your own monkeys. But the other party may not be aware of these factors.• At the same time, the other guy has problems too – and he isn’t going to tell you about the monkeys on his back as this would only weaken his position. • So you have a distorted view of the power balance. It’s distorted because you have taken account of all your monkeys, but have not allowed for the monkeys he almost certainly has on his back – because you don’t know about those. And the distortion is always in the same direction: it always leads you to underestimate your own power.
