Author name: Ron

Every day, regardless of the weather, I walk three miles through my neighborhood. While I walk I listen to audiobooks, mostly fiction, mostly excellent. I trawl through the New York Times looking for book reviews or winners of the Booker or Nobel prizes and download them. It is awesome training for a mediator. To listen […]

Four men grew up together and started a business because they enjoyed hanging out. Soon the product started making money and they created a crude profit share arrangement and that sufficed. Then they began creating ancillary businesses tied into the original and those started making money too. So much unexpected money that one of them

When I was a kid one of the worst things we could do to a kid who wasbothering us was to stick our tongues out at them. It was when words,not yet in existence, could not be drawn upon, leaving the onlyavailable option being a child-sized tongue bulging benignly through ascrunched-up mouth accompanied by equally

As my business as a mediator begins to take off and I start to get more paying clients, I am aware of how much I still have to learn. It was ever thus. The twenty-five years I spent as an actor in the UK was a constant learning curve wherein I was fortunate to learn

I used to be a Vistage guest speaker. Vistage is an extraordinary organization spread all over the world, which sponsors small groups of businesswomen and men, corporate executives, and CEO’s who coalesce around a theme of making themselves better. Aside from mentoring each other, advising each other, and supporting each other, Vistage sends guest speakers

In order to make a living while I am building my mediation business, I work as an adjunct professor of Acting at a local college. One of the basic but most difficult aspects of acting to be learned is the art of listening. Not just pretending to listen but actually listening tolines that you sometimes

Often, when disputants arrive in my Magnum Mediation virtual meeting room they have lost something. Whether it is money, friends, business partners, neighbors, inheritance, land, the list is endless. But the one thing they all have in common is grief. Grief over something or someone they’ve lost. The blame is usually shifted onto the other

A few months ago, I mediated a family business dispute and they paidme well. I deposited the money in my business account, shifted some ofit into a tax account and just let it sit there. There is always aninternal debate on how I can best spend the money I make as a mediatorin order to

As a mediator, I’m obligated to sit in a room, virtual or otherwise, and listen to complete strangers relate the circumstances of their dispute in ways they hope will be compelling and convincing. Occasionally they embellish those stories. Occasionally they lie. How do we, as professional neutrals, discern the truth from the…untruth? Why do we