Bear with me for a second and let's jump into a time machine together and travel to a corporate retreat, oh, 20 years into the future. Bear with me a tad further and let's pretend that once our time machine reaches its destination, we eagerly unbuckle and leap from the contraption and, poof, you - Mr. or Ms. CFO - all of a sudden find yourself in charge of a workshop called, say, "Leadership Through Negotiation" where the subtitle is something like "How to Achieve a Win-Win Solution for Both Sides."

There are books, research papers and historical Webinars galore on the subject, so there's no problem finding core material. But what might you use as a real-world case study that has stood the test of time and may have even created a kind of legacy ripple that extended, I don't know, 20 years into the future?

At the risk of looking stupid in the year 2030 (believe me, this will still be out there on the Internets, a series of tubes, somewhere, and I'll only be in my 50s (hah!)) -- I'll suggest today as excellent case-study matter the current - as in 2010 - fight between Democrats and Republicans over health care reform aka health-insurance reform.

The Dems knew they had it in the bag when Barack Obama was inaugurated a little over a year ago. After all, they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. And they themselves were saying that the defining domestic issue of their time was health-insurance reform, i.e., turning insurance into more of a public-service sort of endeavor than a purely profit-driven corporate enterprise. But, alas, the clock tick-tocked, the insurance lobby cranked up, the economy went south, attentions were diverted, the months crept past, Ted Kennedy died and the Saints won the Super Bowl.  Right around the time hell froze over in New Orleans the good voters of Massachusetts elected an anti-health-insurance-reform candidate to take his place.

Big deal, right? The Dems were still in control of the Senate, not to mention both "houses" that mattered -- Representatives and White. They could steamroll the Republicans, who had taken on the dubious imprimatur of the Party of No, arguing with admirable consistency against changing anything of importance and throwing up roadblocks even though they were outnumbered and presumably outgunned.

But of course the Senate gummed things up. Being the one government chamber of civility and good manners, its tradition requires everybody to work by consensus, thus the magic and mythical 60-vote requirement to Get Anything Done. Mythical, I say, because although it takes 60 votes to beat the filibuster, budgetary proposals can be passed by a simple majority.

And this is what's going to happen now - you can watch the beginning of the end of the resistance today on C-SPAN - as the Republicans realize that the Dems have called their bluff. The party in power has finally said okay, fine, we don't need 60 votes, we'll take 51.  And they will pass health-insurance reform. It may not (yet!) include the vilified public option, but it will cow the insurance industry into a good deal of the submission it deserves. Insurance companies at long last will no longer be able to walk all over their customers, and they will soon have to insure all the many and diverse American they'd would rather ignore.

Oh, and the Republicans will have gone down in ignominy simply because they were too stubborn to budge. Remember, Mr. or Ms. CFO, you're leading a seminar on "Leadership Through Negotiation" here, and the lesson you're teaching via this case study is that leadership without negotiation isn't leadership at all.

It's a lesson the Republicans are learning as we speak in the here and now of 2010, and they will have little need for your workshop by the year 2030 because they will either (a) have taken it to heart or (b) become extinct through their mindless persistence on defending the fading status quo.

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