Ben Kimura-Gross

Ben Kimura-Gross did not come to water through a membrane or a molecule, and he is the first to say so: on the podcast he tells Antoine plainly that he is "not a water person." Ben Kimura-Gross spent more than a decade as a communications and negotiation trainer for the kind of clients that pay well, in pharma, IT, news media and government, until, in his words, he "had the wool pulled from his eyes." The more he looked at what his friends in green tech were actually up against, the more one imbalance bothered him, and that imbalance is what he has been working on ever since.

Ben Kimura-Gross calls that imbalance "Negotiating with Goliath." His argument is that the people pushing for change in sustainability are usually out-negotiated by the overwhelmingly powerful, change-resistant organizations sitting across the table, the utilities, the oil-and-gas majors, the incumbents who can simply wait a startup out. There are brilliant negotiators in green tech, he is quick to add, but as a sector it shows up to the most important conversations under-trained, and that is the gap he set out to close: handing impact founders the one skill that engineers almost never practise.

Ben Kimura-Gross teaches it less like a sales seminar and more like a martial art. His favourite frame is Aikido, where you never meet aggression with aggression, because your counterpart may simply be stronger than you are, the way a small water startup is out-muscled when it walks in to negotiate with a power-production giant. The move, then, is to meet that force calmly, with better questions and self-control rather than clever comebacks. Listening, he insists, is the muscle people most need to train, not the snappy line, and the discipline is to stay tactically flexible and strategically unwavering.

Ben Kimura-Gross refuses to cast the other side as villains, and that refusal is the heart of his method. Even the oil-and-gas executive who looks bent on destruction is, to him, a rational actor seeing the world through a different set of patterns, and you cannot move someone you have decided is simply evil. Born in Berlin and with family and a second home in Tokyo, he frames negotiation as the patient work of finding genuinely shared goals, which is a more useful starting point than being right. Today Ben Kimura-Gross has folded that thinking into Catalyne, where he turns the same playbook into a sales tool for impact founders, water companies among them.

“Be tactically flexible and strategically unwavering.”

Ben Kimura-Gross is, in the end, the rare guest on a water show who never claims to know water, and that is exactly why his episode is worth an engineer's time: the technology can be flawless and still die in a meeting it never learned how to win.