Negotiations play a major part in our everyday work experience. We negotiate with coworkers, colleagues, and customers in accepting ideas and proposals, in winning jobs, in buying and selling products or services, and in resolving conflicts. Yet repetition of the task hasn’t made it any easier. For centuries, negotiating in a formal setting has instilled fear in the hearts of people: the fear of intimidation and the fear of losing. Only recently have negotiators embraced the idea that all parties can walk away from a discussion as winners. And language plays a big part in setting the tone, shaping how people think and feel about working together, and dictating the final outcome.

Certainly, the economic meltdown and recession of 2008–2010 turned executives in the financial, auto, and housing industries into negotiators—whether they welcomed the role or not.

But former President George Herbert Walker Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, probably did more to shape thinking about successful negotiations than any other pair of negotiators in modern history. Bush reasserted our security role in Panama, built the best relationship with Mexico in U.S. history, negotiated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, stood close to center stage in unifying Germany, remained resolute with regard to reshaping policies in South Africa, and held a careful balance on the sidelines during the collapse of the USSR. His finest hour was Desert Storm, when he assembled the largest coalition of nations in the history of the world to stand firm against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Although looking back two decades later at the ongoing Middle East unrest, critics might say that the negotiated peace in Iraq did not last, but that does not detract from his efforts to stop the invasion of Kuwait.

How did this pair triumph on so many negotiating fronts involving so many cultures and economies? The following tips will shed some light on this formidable process.