“I’ve never seen anyone win in a war. I’ve only seen people lose less.”
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| Michael Tsur, crisis negotiator |
When the towers of 9/11 came down, a bewildered humanity walked through the city’s dust into a new world.
It had turned upside down in a nanosecond, and the
consequences would forever change the shape of international relations and
international negotiations.
“Before the turn of the century,” says Michael Tsur,
an international high-crisis negotiator, “we were kings. We ruled the world from our desktops. With
the flick of a finger we could gather mountains of data to argue against our
opponents, learn their secrets, access their worth. We were tough,we were in
charge, we were aggressive.”
But Tsur, who has negotiated hundreds of high
profile, complex business disputes, says that doesn’t work anymore.
“Our great
mistake was that we failed to see how that world had changed. In a world
dominated now by terrorism, fear and mistrust, this combative mindset simply
created more fear and more chaos.”
