Category Archives: Gray Area

Negotiating Strategy; Selling on the Silk Road

PUSHING BAZAAR The largest market in Central Asia is the Pushing Bazaar in Ashkabad.  Why ”pushing”?  Because it’s packed with potential customers and onlookers, and you have to push your way through the crowd to get anywhere. And once you’re there bargaining for something, if the action is interesting, people will push their way into the situation, offering their own assessment of the item’s value, and arguing with each other about it (in the Turkmen language – you haven’t a clue what they’re saying).  It’s a pastime for them. The place is huge, full of color, texture and sound, and is roughly … Continue reading

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Resources in Strategy; Lye Brook Wilderness

BOURN POND Its nice sitting in this  tree.  The sun has broken through intermittent clouds, switching on the brilliant leaves of my red maple.  This is no ordinary tree.  It’s a cage.  The main trunk is normal for the first two or three feet.  Then it splits into 5 sub-trunks that start horizontally for a couple of feet, then go straight up, creating a cage.  Once inside it, your visual field is saturated red leaves.  Gorgeous.  The tree is on the shore of Bourn Pond in the Lye Brook Wilderness in southern Vermont; it’s the only place I’ve seen trees … Continue reading

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Negotiating Strategy; Buying on the Silk Road

SITTING here with family and friends on a large wooden divan in a Samarkand chaikhana, sipping that good tea, and eating some local snacks …  we were about to take in some of the city’s magnificent architecture.  Tomorrow we would be going to the Registan, a great market where I could take a shot at doing some negotiating with Silk Road merchants renowned for their sophisticated bargaining. The Silk Road Built on even much earlier trade routes, the Silk Road was a well-established overland route by 200 BC, that primarily connected the Mediterranean and China.  No surprise, a principal commodity of trade … Continue reading

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Strategy in the News: Lasso and Lascaux

LASSO Well-regarded author Patricia O’Brien had produced 5 novels.  But her last one hadn’t sold well, and her Simon & Shuster editor declined to publish her new one, “The Dressmaker”.  A dozen more publishers also rejected the efforts of her well-known literary agent, Esther Newberg, to secure a contract for the book. What was going on?  Turns out O’Brien’s book was being rejected because her numbers had been lowered in Nielsen BookScan, a book sales tracking service, as a result of the performance of her most recent book.  And the publishing house editors were making their publishing decisions based on … Continue reading

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The Gray Area

Mt. Sopris  The scene below is of Mount Sopris, a prominent feature of the Maroon Bells – Snowmass Wilderness in western Colorado.  We’re here, you and I, because we’re doing a little reconnaissance for a flight in an altitude-limited light plane that will take us past that peak tomorrow morning. It’s a gorgeous day and getting here was an easy hike.  We find ourselves in a benign, rather soft and idyllic scene:  green, rolling hills, open woodlands; it’s sunny and the warm air has amped up the smell of the pines.  We’re sitting here, taking in the mountain, brilliant in … Continue reading

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