Speaking & Media
Collaborative Hardball
Book Talk
Using the Power of a New Negotiation as Women to Change the World
Join me for an engaging conversation around my book, "Collaborative Hardball." In this intimate session, I’ll share key themes, read a powerful excerpt, and connect the book’s message to your world. Expect insights, stories, and a lively Q&A that brings how we navigate differences — and why it matters—fully to life.
Keynote Topics & Outcomes
I offer dynamic keynote experiences tailored to your event. Choose from:
Negotiating in Systems Not Designed for You
Many women are told to “lean in” without acknowledging that the systems they’re navigating were not built with them in mind; this keynote offers practical tools and strategic clarity for building influence, resilience, and structural change from within. Participants leave understanding how to negotiate power in environments shaped by legacy norms — without losing themselves in the process.
Collaborative Hardball:
Using the Power of a New Negotiation as Women to Change the World
In a time of polarization, burnout, and democratic strain, Susan introduces Collaborative Hardball — a bold new model of negotiation that blends firmness and relational intelligence to help women claim power, drive change, and reshape the systems that shape us. This keynote shows how everyday negotiations — at work, at home, and in public life — are the building blocks of a more just and sustainable world.
A New Model of Power: What Feminine-Infused Leadership Actually Looks Like
This keynote reframes “feminine leadership” as strategic, systemic, and world-shaping — not soft — and demonstrates how integrating relational strength with clarity and courage transforms negotiation, culture, and collective outcomes. It offers a concrete vision of leadership capable of meeting today’s global challenges.
Target Audience:
Executive leadership teams, forward-thinking corporations, mixed-gender audiences, foundations, global conferences, and leaders exploring next-generation models of power and collaboration.
For Meeting Professionals
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For over thirty-five years, Susan Coleman has worked from war zones to boardrooms teaching people negotiation skills, mediating conflict, and supporting clients in collaborative change initiatives through facilitation and coaching. She has worked with tens of thousands of people in thirty-four countries, on just about every continent, and with hundreds of organizations, governments, teams, and individuals including the United Nations, NASA, Senior Women Leaders of the Government of Afghanistan, and Columbia University.
Her initiative with the UN ultimately resulted in over one hundred thousand professionals being trained in collaborative, intercultural negotiation, one of the largest peacebuilding initiatives on the planet. She started her professional journey as a litigator in New York City but detoured to the negotiation and conflict resolution field after attending the Kennedy School at Harvard.
Coleman was born into one of the oldest colonial American families, where she has had a front row seat to the ironies of privilege, power, and patriarchy. Throughout her life, she has been an activist for evolutionary social change with a deep respect for both the diversity of humans and the natural world.
Hi, I’m Susan.
I’ve built a career spanning decades in negotiation and conflict resolution, working globally and across sectors.
I focus explicitly on empowering women, through my book, podcasts, and work.
I model what I teach: I’m not only a practitioner, but I’ve lived the journey of navigating and reshaping power dynamics
And I’m brave: whether backcountry skiing the Eklutna Traverse or windsurfing in challenging waters, I push boundaries. I help others step into that same boldness in negotiation and leadership. And defying the gravity of patriarchy
