Never Split the Difference

Never Split the Difference:  Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz, HarperBusiness 2016

It's a verifiable fact, the few tried and true axioms I thought I learned from Dave Nelson and Donald Trump are not what authors Voss and Raz recommend!  At least certainly not in a high-stakes hostage negotiation!

Voss, who was involved in more than 150 international kidnapping cases in two decades with the FBI,  takes a hard no-compromise position to start and works forward from there.  Voss admits that his 9-point approach may seem counter-intuitive, but what the authors believe sets their approach apart from others is that he let's emotion take center stage, "We meat heads at the FBI began to train our agents in an unproven system based on psychology, counseling, and crisis intervention.  While the Ivy League taught math and economics, we became experts in empathy.  And our way worked."    So he's got an attitude!

Voss urges us to think about "yes" and to avoid the compromise first off - "While compromise is a bad idea, at the same time you should never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better."  Further, Voss offers the nine counter intuitive techniques and strategies that he contends will give anyone the competitive edge in negotiation:

Here are a few negotiation suggestions:  change your tone of voice, the types of questions you ask, or even how you enter the conversation in the first place.  "The word "yes" has become the only thing many people want to hear.  We're hypnotized by it.  "Yes" can be a siren song that's used to lure us into bad deals.  Because of this, many shrewd negotiators attempt to trap us with "yes".  The flip side of this is as soon as we hear someone trying to get a "yes" out of us we become defensive and stop listening.  We immediately worry about where a "yes" might take us, or what it might commit us to.   One of the things I teach is that there are actually three kinds of "yes" and one of them isn't what we believe.  Counter intuitively, "no" is protection.  When we say "no", instead of worrying about what we've committed ourselves to, we relax because we've just protected ourselves.  Strategic use of triggering "no" can reap significant advantages."

What are Black Swans?  Voss says they are the seemingly innocuous pieces of information that change everything, things that, if we knew them, would alter outcomes.  What are the differences in negotiation style between men and women?  Of the presidential candidates, is there one whom the author thinks truly gets it?  The answer - and its not Trump - to these and other detailed war stories will take readers beyond traditional negotiation cookbooks.