The Thirty-Nine Steps

"Well, use your head, son," he said, smiling. Which really meant, "That's all I'm going to tell you," or "I don't know the answer, so don't embarrass me." A Partnership Is Formed The next morning, I told my best friend, Mike, what my dad had said. As best I could tell, Mike and I were the only poor kids in this school. Mike was like me in that he was in this school by a twist of fate. Someone had drawn a jog in the line for the school district, and we wound up in school with the rich kids. We…

He says that Western companies think they can avoid political risk by spelling out every detail in a contract, but "in Asia, there is no shortcut for managing the relationship."88 In other words, the contract is in the relationship, not on the paper, and the way to ensure the reliability of the agreement is to nurture the relationship. Even a deal that has been implemented for some time may start to get watered down at a time when you cannot do anything about it. A Japanese-led consortium…

In the twentieth century many reached the understanding that disputes are normal in human society, and not necessarily destructive, and that if they do not get out of hand they may have within them a potential for growth, maturity, and social changes, an opportunity for new ways of thinking and new experiences. Because conflicts are an integral part of human interaction, one should learn to manage them: to deal with them in a way that prevents escalation and destruction, and arrives at new,…