In this last segment, I want to think about the importance of endings, and how we end things influences how we start what comes next. And I want to share a story about one of my friends Angel Calzadilla. He's a crisis negotiator in Miami, Florida. Now one day he was called to an incident. A man named Paris had held three suit cases over a barbed wire fence and up a tower. At the top of the treated tower he was throwing down leaflets that read listen to Paris. Well a crowd had gathered below is beginning to stop traffic, the SWAT team is called in and a crisis negotiator needed to convince this guy to come down and stop creating all this commotion. When they got there they didn't know exactly how to communicate with him until they finally figured out well, we can communicate by helicopter. So Angel goes up in a helicopter, is writing on these large sheets of paper, and is getting Paris to shake his head yes or no to get him to communicate to eventually persuade him to come down. It takes hours. It takes so long they have to refuel the helicopter. Finally, Angel persuades him, if you come down now, you can come down, and I'll let you speak to the media. Who knows, another story could break, you could lose your opportunity, you have a message, now is your time to get it out. Finally, Angel persuades Paris to come down. He comes down, they think he may have a bomb, it turns out he didn't. He comes down, the SWAT team is tired, they're exhausted, they want to throw Paris in the van. Angel intervenes and says, no, I know you're sick, you're tired, you just want to throw this guy out. But we're saying, no, I promised him he could speak to the media, I'm going to follow through on that promise. So Angel let's him speak to the media. He runs over the media and says, even if you have no film, just turn your lights on, let the guy speak. So they let the guy speak. And it turns out, he had some very unusual demands. He wanted less asphalt. He wanted more horses. More bicycles. And this is 1996 he wanted to Bob Dole's running mate and here's the most interesting demand. He wanted an end not to all pornography he wanted end to Russian pornography. For some reason that was the variant that was really bothering him. Now, here's the funny part about this story. First, it turns out he had a funny, he followed through on this ending. But the second part is that it doesn't end there. Months later after Paris had been incarcerated but then released, he did after all have a bomb. He wasn't deemed a threat to society. Months later, Angel's pacing around his house. He's hanging out with his family. He gets a page. And he looks down and he's like ugh. A page, I can't believe it. It's Easter Sunday, gets a page, he goes up, shows up on scene. There's a guy and they say look Angel, here's a guy and he wants to talk to you. And here it is, Paris, he's climbed up a pylon and he has similar demands to make. Now the second negotiation goes very quickly, very smoothly. They had already built their relationship. Paris trusted Angel to follow through. So here, how Angel had ended that first interaction influenced the way that second interaction went. And something else really interesting here is that we often think of crisis negotiations as single shot events. That is it will be easy for Angel to have said, you know what, this is a one shot deal, here's the guy we got him, let's throw him in the van, but Angel follows through, recognizing that even in unusual weird cases, sometimes what seems like a single shot case is repeated interaction. That is, when it comes to crisis negotiations, we're not expecting repeat business but we can sometimes be surprised. Next I want to think about endings on a bigger scale. Here on the world stage, we think about the end of the Cold War. This is a war that raged for decades between the Soviet Union and the United States. Now finally, the Berlin Wall fell down and as it fell down people streamed across the border and was heralded as a great victory for the western countries, the United States and Western Europe, and it created an opportunity for Germany to become reunited. And it marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Now for the United States, it seemed like a great victory. But President George Bush at the time didn't gloat, he didn't even make much of a deal about it. He was incredibly understated about this because he knew that working with Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, he needed to effect cooperation and he knew that if he gloated about that victory, it would make it much more difficult for him to work with Gorbachev going forward. And the same thing about ending is true in a lot of different domains. Think about negotiations, of course we can think about being happy after we've reached a deal, perhaps even a deal that's really great for us. And yet, Just like it's important not to gloat when the wall falls down, it's important not to gloat when we end up with a good deal in a negotiation. And here you ought to be careful, even smiling too much after you reach a negotiated agreement.
