Next time you're stuck trying to close something, stop asking what you want. Ask what's keeping the other side up at night
Aside from design, I've been reading about the plan handed to Britain's new PM this week - the one where the UK could get back into the EU single market in exchange for extending its military protection, nuclear umbrella included, across the continent.
Politics aside, there's a business lesson in this story that I can't stop turning over.
The reasoning behind it, according to Nick Boles, comes down to this - negotiate market access as a purely selfish ask and you lose. Frame the exact same ask as something that also fixes a problem the other side is already losing sleep over, and the door opens.
That's the whole game, really. Not just in Westminster and Brussels. In every negotiation, every sales call, every partnership pitch that's ever actually gone somewhere.
Most people ask for what they want and hope the other side says yes out of fairness or goodwill. The ones who close things are the ones who find the version of their ask that quietly solves someone else's problem too.
3.5% of GDP on defence, a nuclear umbrella stretched wider than it's ever been, Ukraine and Switzerland and Norway invited into the same room - none of that is really about trade. It's fear finding a shared home in one document.
I have no idea if this plan goes anywhere. Most plans built this way don't survive contact with actual politics.
But the instinct behind it is worth stealing regardless. Next time you're stuck trying to close something, stop asking what you want. Ask what's keeping the other side up at night. Build your ask around that instead.
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