Here's one to ponder. Purely hypothetical of course.
Say you are an ex-diplomat turmned consultant of no little erstwhile seniority, and you are asked to help with a significant business problem involving a foreign government and a private corporation. You are happy in principle to help the corporation move the issue forward, which means facilitating a high-level meeting with the government of that country. How best to do it?
First (and probably foremost), you need to find out what exactly you are being asked to do, and why. Maybe you are being set up by one part of the corporation to fail, as part of an internal power-play between its executives. You don't want to use up your own precious credibility points by blundering in on behalf of someone else's doomed machinations.
When you are satisfied that the mission makes sense, you then need to agree with the corporation a plan for communicating with the government concerned. They'll tend to want you to approach the Top Person (PM or President) and not namby-pamby around with lesser people, as they'll assume - not necessarily wrongly - that that person calls the key shots. Plus they'll say that the whole point of engaging you for a sizeable fee is to get access to higher points in the system than they themselves can reach.
So, question: do you go straight for the top or not?
The advantage of going straight to the Top Person is that you stop messing about and in effect raise the stakes.
The problem with approaching the Top Person's office directly is that all sorts of other people in the local policy food-chain (such as the Minister with the policy portfolio concerned) may get annoyed at being over-jumped (as it implies that they are not seen by you and the corporation as worthy interlocutors).
In any case, all the Top Person can do to meet your request is to ask the system for some sort of briefing on the whole business, and indeed on you. No-one (least of all a Top Person) wants to be bounced by a clever glib foreigner. So annoyed people further down the line may make that briefing disobliging or craftily seek to slow down any good (for you) outcome to assert their control.
Even if you nonetheless decide to make the Top Person the direct target of your mission, you again have choices. Open an informal line of communication to the office concerned using a local well-placed friend? Or instead write a letter to the chef de cabinet explaining what you want and proposing a meeting? Make the approach via the country's Ambasador in London, or our Embassy in the country concerned? Some or all of the above?
No easy answers. Whatever approach you choose has genuine pros and cons, and may be interpreted in some sort of ridiculous conspiratorial way by different parts of the bureaucracy in the country you are approaching.
My own instinct is to do things in the most straightforward 'professional' way possible but also use some subtlety to prepare the ground.
For example, you might use your local contacts to find the right number so that you can telephone the Top Person's office and politely let them know that a request for a meeting will be coming.
That done, you then can ask the Ambassador in London whether s/he is ready to help facilitate meetings by you with the key people concerned, proposing that maybe a good way to proceed could be for you to meet the Minister concerned first and then in the light of that discussion have a shorter informal word with the Top Person thereafter. You also might mention that you understand that the Top Person's office know that a request for a meeting will be arriving soon, and stress that given the significance and sensitivity of the issue that conversation could be productive for all concerned. And you might hand over a Note of some sort requesting the key meetings and explaining in simple confidential terms what you wish to cover, and why you think the other side might find it helpful to meet you.
That way of doing the business is transparent and, crucially, studiously respectful to their system. The Ambassador will immediately grasp what you are saying, namely that you are of a status that can confidently get access to the Top Person's office - and probably have already done so. That will make the Ambassador err on the side of sending the request plus Note back to his capital both to the key Minister and the Top Person's office, perhaps with a non-commital steer in favour of your plan.
Does all that guarantee success? No. The timing of your initiative may suit the corporation but not the government. Other things can go wrong - the key people are away on the dates that suit you. And plenty of other problems.
Nevertheless, diplomacy is all about giving yourself good chances, and making sure that even if things don't work out this time you have maintained credibility for the next approach, whenever that is.
In short, it's all about Technique, not improvizacija. Something lots of people forget, if they ever understood it in the first place.
