Silk Tie Competitions to Train Negotiators

“Blevins couldn’t be at every meeting, so he taught his subordinates the values he’d picked up working at a used-car lot as a teenager. When the procurement team would meet in Hong Kong or Shenzhen, each would be given the same amount of currency, then sent off to the local market for a set time. Whoever came back with the most silk ties was the winner. This game would be played over and over again, inculcating a sense of intense competition.”

“Blevins had already been a spectacular negotiator, and as Apple grew, he developed further ways to tilt the field. He’d organize suppliers into adjacent hotel rooms, then travel from one to the next, pushing prices lower and subtly indicating that some rival had just made a better offer. Blevins wouldn’t let the suppliers order food or leave the rooms, and depending on the situation, he’d toy with the temperature. If it was the kind of hot and humid summer in Hong Kong when nobody would think to have brought a jacket, Blevins would crank up the air-conditioning in the hotel room, to the point where only the Apple team was appropriately dressed. “Then they would go all night till they made them cave,” one colleague says. Apple’s terms could be hard to say no to. In the 2010s, Apple would often ramp a product from hundreds of thousands of units to the tens of millions. Margins might be risibly low, but a supplier could become rich off the volumes.”