Businesses, or rather their leadership, is often saddled with a set of problems and daily issues that prevents them from taking an objective view of their realities…forget the trees, often there is too much leaf watching to notice they are in a forest.

A lot of negotiation is teaching people tricks or verbal games, as opposed to providing a framework for thinking about negotiation. People want to come up with a solution that's fair. But what they think of as fair is often proportional division, and that just arises because they don't really understand what they're negotiating over.

Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood. We look at information coming in from the external world, determine what is useful, determine how we understand it, build a fuller picture and effect change. A surgical mindset is very much that.

the U.S. faces a 25 percent chance of a double dip and deflation.

If I ask better questions, they come up with better answers.