Four rooms that made a negotiator.
On alert over ten nuclear missiles.
From 1992 to 1996 Philip served as a U.S. Air Force missile launch officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. He sat alert in an underground launch capsule, miles from the silos, responsible for ten Minuteman III missiles.
Crews there were trained, tested and evaluated until the right response was automatic. It is where he learned that people do not rise to the occasion. They fall to the level of their preparation.
A trial attorney with his own firm.
After law school at Brigham Young University, Philip tried cases as a trial attorney and built his own law firm. He learned how people decide when money and pride are both on the line, and how often the better case loses to the better-prepared side.
At 44, he was told there was no cure.
Doctors told him he had a progressive neurological condition with no cure. He closed his law firm. Years of fog followed.
The diagnosis was wrong.
What he found in the fog.
During those years he read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and then took a negotiation course built on the same ideas. He had found his calling: negotiation is not a bag of tactics. It is behavior, and behavior can be trained.
He rebuilt his health, and the fog lifted. He trained at Harvard, taught MBA students as an associate professor, taught negotiation to the U.S. military in Asia for three years, and coached a university negotiation team to third place nationally in his first year and second place in each of the next two. The work he did while he rebuilt became The Bold Negotiator.
