Learning from pilots how to better negotiate

Flying always fascinated me and, while I did not have the chance to become an airline pilot, I recently started having flying lessons as a hobby. I also started learning much more about what it means to be a pilot - and I realized that, as a business negotiator, I could learn a lot from pilots and step-change the chances of winning my deals. Let me start with one (negative) example: On Feb 21, 2008, Santa Barbara Airlines' Flight 518 taking off from Merida airport in Venezuela and heading to Caracas crashed into a nearby mountain shortly after departure, killing all its 46 people onboard. It was the deadliest accident involving…

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“Don’t leave me hanging!” – a desperate cry for normality

For some time I've been considering writing a post about something that I see increasingly more often and it gets me very worried: buyers never revert to suppliers or salespeople, therefore the negotiations are left "in the air". The title of this post, "Don't leave me hanging", comes from a supplier I met not long ago who literally begged me to give him feedback about his offer, no matter if it was a positive or a negative one. He said it smiling, trying to pretend it was a joke, but I could feel his bitterness, probably coming from previous unhappy encounters. In my 25+ years working in business, most of the…

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