I graduated with an A.B. in English Education from UNC-Chapel Hill. My Masters in Adult Education was with Malcolm Knowles at Boston University. My Diploma in Advanced Studies in Gestalt Psychology was from the New England Gestalt Institute.

During 12 years at GE-Aircraft Engines, I served as personnel manager for the sourcing and manufacturing technology organizations and as manager of marketplace education and professional development.

From 1986-89 I lived in India, designing and running training programs for GE International people in Europe and South Asia. These programs included negotiation, communication skills, effective people management, person-job matching, and strategic account management.

My husband Joe and I established the Mattford Group in 1988. Since then, thousands of aviation/aerospace people have used our Negotiating Solutions workshop to discover at a deep value level the far superior results possible through interest-based negotiation.

This book was my September 11th response. As you may recall much too vividly, after September 11th, our aviation businesses were struggling to survive, stabilize and rebuild. A 2002 article in Business Week said they were “grappling with their costs, capacity, pricing and product features in ways they hadn’t seriously contemplated since the start of deregulation in 1978.” They were laying off appalling numbers of people. They were simultaneously implementing major change initiatives – lean applied to the shop floor and to business processes, value-streaming, supply chain management and others. They were seeking to implement massive changes in how they worked in the marketplace with suppliers, customers and partners. And they also had identified the need to change the working relationship between management and employee groups.

But there was one element of change that no one was addressing. I kept waiting for someone famous to talk about it and write about it, because I knew that unless it too was addressed, these other efforts could not succeed.

This element has to do not with the content side of change – which is what everyone was paying attention to – but with what Douglas McGregor called “the human side of enterprise.” It has to do with how we do what we do with one another. But nobody wrote that book. Nobody made that case.

I finally realized I was closest. So I wrote it.