(CNN) -- Jeff Weiss had spent 20 years teaching negotiation skills to top executives when he realized those techniques might be just as valuable to soldiers on the battlefield. 

So a decade ago, he approached the U.S. Military to teach officers negotiation tools and strategies they could use in a theater of war. The West Point Negotiation Project was founded, and before long, Weiss made another realization: the lessons could go the other way, too. 

"There's a ton to take from the military back to the corporations," says Weiss, a partner at Vantage Partners, a Boston-based negotiation training and consulting firm that works with Fortune 500 companies. "Business leaders have a lot to learn from military leaders who, in extreme situations, are able to take a deep breath, get perspective and negotiate through a set of strategies." 

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Perhaps counter-intuitively, the best military negotiators adopt a creative, problem-solving approach. A more macho, "Rambo style" of negotiation -- in which the negotiator digs in inflexibly to a position they believe to be right -- is "just not effective," Weiss says, and could lead to fatal errors. 

"When we're under pressure to act fast in a high-stakes situation, it often leads us to a set of traps," he adds. "We often act on perception and assumptions, we tend to use a strong position and dig in, we tend to use threats and we play a concessions game far too frequently." 

Below are five key points into which Weiss has distilled the essence of successful deal-making, which he says are equally applicable whether you're dealing with potentially hostile stakeholders on the battlefield, or a fellow boardroom warrior. 
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Jeff Weiss had spent 20 years teaching negotiation skills to top executives when he realized those techniques might be just as valuable to soldiers on the battlefield. 