Negotiation Training in Bangalore, India

I was interested by a report I read on the NHS website on 21 August in which Public Health England published an “evidence review” about e-cigarettes, stating that they were 95% safer than cigarettes and that, further, they were an effective quitting aid for smokers.  As a result of the review, e-cigarettes are to be licensed and regulated as an aid to quit smoking from 2016.

The practice of misleading often works through what philosophers call "conversational implicature". When we communicate with one another, there are a set of background rules which govern the meaning of our sentences.

We have a problem with my mother. She is a gregarious 90 year old, has successfully lived on her own since my Dad died 10 years ago, she is full of life and bright as a button, lots of friends, goes out to play cards five times a week. Until three weeks ago. Her arthritic knees gave up, and she became virtually immobile. She can hobble around her small apartment with the aid of a 3-wheeled ‘walker’, but the stairs are impossible, and she lives one floor up in a building without an elevator. She has become housebound.

In March this year, a ticket inspector working for ScotRail, the main provider of train services in Scotland (I suppose you might argue that the clue is in the name!) reduced a passenger to tears.  This was a first on Britain's railways; normally it is late-running trains and cancellations that reduce passengers to tears, but on this occasion, sadly for Scott Lewis, the ticket inspector involved, he had got the whole thing completely wrong.

They eat a lot of peanuts in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a landing on Mars approaches.  It is an old tradition that dates back to 31 July 1964 when Ranger 7, an unmanned space probe was due to approach the planet, take a few pictures on the way down, then crash onto the surface at breakneck speed.  Bear in mind that only a year or two previously, President Kennedy had targeted the USA with landing men on the moon, then returning them safely to Earth by the end of that decade.  You would have thought, would you not, that crashing onto Mars would have been well within the wit and capability of the good folks at NASA; sadly not.  Rangers 1 through 6 had failed miserably in their various attempts to crash on the planet and Ranger 7 was their last shot at glory.

Their context is the chronic shortage of water in California. This has now become so bad that new mandatory water-reduction regulations came into effect on April 1st. Most of these appear to concern communal water usage such as sprinklers on golf courses and cemeteries, and the replacement of community lawns with grasses which are more resistant to drought conditions. Private citizens are encouraged to improve water retention methods through a rebate scheme on new garden watering equipment, and new homes are subject to stricter regulations.

Here in the UK in the Autumn and the first part of Winter a televisual phenomenon hits our screens on a Saturday night.  It’s called ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ or just ‘Strictly’ to the real addicts.  A number of so-called celebrities are partnered with professional dancers and week by week they compete against each other in a knockout competition where viewers’ votes decide which contestant will be eliminated each week.

‘So what are you doing about Brexit’ demanded my 90-year-old Mum. ‘Why should I be doing anything about it?’ I asked. ‘Because every other sentence on the news channels since Friday morning has contained the word Negotiation’ she said.

Imagine this scenario. You are driving through city streets as a passenger with a colleague at the wheel. He is driving faster than the speed limit, trying to get a meeting on time, and is involved in a minor accident; no one is hurt but the police are called.

The idea that Inuit have so many words for snow has given rise to the idea that they view snow very differently from people of other cultures. For example, when it snows, many see snow, but Inuit could see any version of their great and varied vocabulary. Using this thinking language is thought to impose a particular view of the world — not just for Inuit languages, but for all groups.

I have just returned from holiday and one of the joys of a holiday is having lots of time to read.  This holiday, one of the books I read was ‘A Street Cat named Bob’.  It’s an uplifting and sometimes challenging book about a recovering drug addict – James Bowen, the author, and his cat, Bob whom he finds in the lobby of his building and whom he helps to recover from neglect and befriends.

I wrote in this blog about three weeks ago about the commitment given by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, to write to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, setting out the demands which the UK would make in its negotiations with the EU prior to a referendum of the British people some time before the end of 2017 which will decide if the UK remains a member of the EU.

It is peculiar how news stories often converge and clash. Newspapers worldwide today report the court-hearing in St Petersburg yesterday which culminated in bail being granted to eight pro-environment Greenpeace activists who had attempted to scale an oil rig in the Pechora Sea in September.

Two accounts clerks and their manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp. They rub it and a Genie comes out.

You have probably never heard of Grangemouth. Even its mother would be hard pressed to call it a pretty town, festooned as it is with tall steel chimneys belching fire into the night sky on the Firth of Forth about 15 miles west of Edinburgh on Scotland’s east coast.

It occurred to me, that the most prominent current industrial dispute in England, between the Government and the Junior Doctors, might be an excellent vehicle to analyse how Millennials (defined typically as born after 1983) negotiate, and whether Millennial traits have impacted on the negotiations.

As the death toll from the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment manufacturing building in Dhaka, Bangladesh approaches 400, the attention of the world's press is focussing on the Western companies who buy merchandise from the manufacturers  located in this and other similar buildings.