Wearing my ADRg Ambassadors hat I was in London on Tuesday to give a workshop to a prominent law firm on The Psychology of Negotiation. The people who attended spend much of their time drafting the legal clauses needed to give effect to deals already done or in prospect. They nonetheless […]
My latest DIPLOMAT piece is up: The UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has an imposing suite of UK-based and e-learning training courses for British diplomats. Some aim at improving skills (Diversity; One Team, Many Cultures; Communication and Assertiveness; Performance Management; First Aid); others look at thematic policy questions (Advanced […]
Yesterday evening as I wearily wended my way home from Paris, I had to get the 2115 train from Paddington to Swansea. For some or other reason it was very full. I made my way to the front of the train to save time when getting off at Didcot, and […]
No sooner had I put out the idea this morning that Gaddafi might do well not to blow Benghazi to bits but instead behave in a more guileful way than the cunning fellow proclaims a ceasefire! I knew of course that he swings by this blog now and again, but […]
David Cameron made a businesslike case in the Observer today for his Big Society initiative: The first objection is that it is too vague. I reject that. True, it doesn’t follow some grand plan or central design. But that’s because the whole approach of building a bigger, stronger, more active […]
Attentive readers recall that a year ago I joined a group of former British Ambassadors in setting up ADRg Ambassadors, a new panel selling professional diplomatic consulting, training and mediation skills to support ‘corporate diplomacy’. Here is what I wrote at the time. Since then we have been busy ‘building the brand’ to […]
The tragic death in Afghanistan of aid worker Linda Norgrove as US Special Forces closed in, seconds away from rescuing her, makes us think about Negotiation again. At the International Bar Association annual conference in Vancouver last week I heard various people say that some major corporations were changing course, […]
So, here I am in shiny modern Vancouver, gearing up for the long flight home this evening. Our ADR Group session on Mediation at the Sharp End at the International Bar Association annual conference went well, with a joint presentation on the diplomatic, legal, negotiating and psychological issues arising from […]
I was back stalking in the long corridors of the Foreign Office today, to give a talk on behalf of ADRg Ambassadors. I put in a word for Mediation as an example of the hard-edged soft power tool the UK now needed to be ffective at a time of growing global uncertainty […]
The important Employment Tribunal hearing into a disability discrimination claim made by an FCO employee against the FCO raises all sorts of intriguing dilemmas for public and private sector employers. Such as this one. Suppose an employer (Frank) has a good, motivated and ambitious employee (Sasha) who is disabled (in […]
