Meet the CNCG Team.
Meet Ruth
Ruth Shlossman is the founder and CEO of Castle Negotiations Consulting Group, Inc. and has spent more than 25 years helping professionals create stronger agreements, navigate difficult conversations, and perform more effectively under pressure. Her clients often refer to her as the Ted Lasso of negotiating. She is hilarious, original, warm, and often a norm-disruptor.
A Harvard-trained M.Ed., Ruth has worked with more than 10,000 professionals, ranging from new hires to senior executives. Her clients and audiences have included BAE Systems, Accenture, AlixPartners, KPS Capital Partners, Chart Industries, and executive leaders through the Institute for Management Studies.
A Harvard-trained M.Ed., Ruth has worked with more than 10,000 professionals, ranging from new hires to senior executives. Her clients and audiences have included BAE Systems, Accenture, AlixPartners, KPS Capital Partners, Chart Industries, and executive leaders through the Institute for Management Studies.
Over the course of her career, Ruth has helped organizations create, protect, and capture more than $1 billion in value through stronger agreements, more effective negotiations, better strategic decisions, and improved execution.
Ruth is widely recognized for identifying emerging trends and challenges that are reshaping the future of negotiation, leadership, and agreement-making. Known for bringing new ideas into practical business conversations long before they become mainstream, her work sits at the intersection of negotiation, leadership, emotional intelligence, decision making, human behavior, and organizational performance.
While many experts focus primarily on tactics and techniques, Ruth has spent much of her career examining why smart, capable people struggle to execute effectively under real pressure. Her work explores the factors that shape agreements before, during, and after the conversation itself, including assumptions, competing interests, emotional triggers, organizational dynamics, and the quality of the decisions being made.
While these disciplines are often treated separately, Ruth helps organizations understand how they work together to drive performance. Better agreements lead to stronger execution. Stronger execution leads to fewer costly misunderstandings, less conflict, improved stakeholder alignment, and better business results.
Meet Chi
Dr. Chiraag (Chi) Hegdekar is an entrepreneur, buyer strategist, and negotiation facilitator whose expertise is built on real-world commercial experience. Chi draws from years of business to business negotiations, structuring partnerships, launching products, and helping businesses grow through better commercial conversations.
As Managing Partner of Castle Negotiations Consulting Group, Chi leads the firm’s marketing strategy and has played a central role in developing its online negotiation training academy. He combines his experience in business growth with Castle’s negotiation methodology to help professionals create enduring agreements.
What makes Chi’s perspective distinctive is his unusually broad background. He holds a doctorate in medicine alongside degrees in computer science, cloud computing, and healthcare management. That combination of analytical thinking, human behavior, technology, and commercial strategy allows him to approach negotiation from multiple perspectives—balancing logic, psychology, communication, and business outcomes.
Whether facilitating workshops, designing learning experiences, or advising organizations, Chi’s focus is simple: helping people negotiate with greater confidence, communicate with greater clarity, and create agreements that produce lasting value.
