Never Split the Difference

Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780062407801
• eBook ISBN: 9780062407818
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Communication

This international bestseller, with more than 5 million copies sold, offers a field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom, in your community, or at home.

Life is a series of negotiations, and negotiation is at the heart of collaboration—whether you are a business executive, a salesperson, a parent , a community leader, or a spouse. As a former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss gives you the tools to be effective in any situation: negotiating a business deal, buying (or selling) a car, negotiating a salary, acquiring a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner, or communicating with your children. Taking the power of persuasion, empathy, active listening, and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any difficult conversation or challenging situation. This book is a masterclass in influencing others, no matter the circumstances.

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference distills the Voss method, revealing the skills that matter most when it comes to achieving your goals in both your professional and personal life.

Step-by-step, Voss show you how to:

• Establish Rapport 
• Create Trust with Tactical Empathy
• Gain the Permission to Persuade 
• Shape What Is Fair 
• Calibrate Questions
• Transform Conflict into Collaboration
• Spot Liars
• Create Breakthroughs by Revealing the Unknown Unknowns

Never Split the Difference is your definitive source for defusing potential crises, winning people over, and achieving your goals at work and at home.

CHAPTER 1

THE NEW RULES

I was intimidated.

I’d spent more than two decades in the FBI, including fifteen years negotiating hostage situations from New York to the Philippines and the Middle East, and I was on top of my game. At any given time, there are ten thousand FBI agents in the Bureau, but only one lead international kidnapping negotiator. That was me.

But I’d never experienced a hostage situation so tense, so personal.

“We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars or he dies.”

Pause. Blink. Mindfully urge the heart rate back to normal.

Sure, I’d been in these types of situations before. Tons of them. Money for lives. But not like this. Not with my son on the line. Not $1 million. And not against people with fancy degrees and a lifetime of negotiating expertise.

You see, the people across the table—my negotiating counterparts—were Harvard Law School negotiating professors.

I’d come up to Harvard to take a short executive negotiating course, to see if I could learn something from the business world’s approach. It was supposed to be quiet and calm, a little professional development for an FBI guy trying to widen his horizons.

But when Robert Mnookin, the director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project, learned I was on campus, he invited me to his office for a coffee. Just to chat, he said.

I was honored. And scared. Mnookin is an impressive guy whom I’d followed for years: not only is he a Harvard law professor, he’s also one of the big shots of the conflict resolution field and the author of Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.¹

To be honest, it felt unfair that Mnookin wanted me, a former Kansas City beat cop, to debate negotiation with him. But then it got worse. Just after Mnookin and I sat down, the door opened and another Harvard professor walked in. It was Gabriella Blum, a specialist in international negotiations, armed conflict, and counterterrorism, who’d spent eight years as a negotiator for the Israeli National Security Council and the Israel Defense Forces. The tough-as-nails IDF.

On cue, Mnookin’s secretary arrived and put a tape recorder on the table. Mnookin and Blum smiled at me.

I’d been tricked.

“We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars or he dies,” Mnookin said, smiling. “I’m the kidnapper. What are you going to do?”

I experienced a flash of panic, but that was to be expected. It never changes: even after two decades negotiating for human lives you still feel fear. Even in a role-playing situation.

I calmed myself down. Sure, I was a street cop turned FBI agent playing against real heavyweights. And I wasn’t a genius. But I was in this room for a reason. Over the years I had picked up skills, tactics, and a whole approach to human interaction that had not just helped me save lives but, as I recognize now looking back, had also begun to transform my own life. My years of negotiating had infused everything from how I dealt with customer service reps to my parenting style.

“C’mon. Get me the money or I cut your son’s throat right now,” Mnookin said. Testy.

I gave him a long, slow stare. Then I smiled.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

Mnookin paused. His expression had a touch of amused pity in it, like a dog when the cat it’s been chasing turns around and tries to chase it back. It was as if we were playing different games, with different rules.

Mnookin regained his composure and eyed me with arched brows as if to remind me that we were still playing.

“So you’re okay with me killing your son, Mr. Voss?”

“I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive?” I said, using an apology and his first name, seeding more warmth into the interaction in order to complicate his gambit to bulldoze me. “I really am sorry, but how can I get you any money right now, much less one million dollars, if I don’t even know he’s alive?”

It was quite a sight to see such a brilliant man flustered by what must have seemed unsophisticated foolishness. On the contrary, though, my move was anything but foolish. I was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.

Today, after some years evolving these tactics for the private sector in my consultancy, The Black Swan Group, we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that the other side can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it does all that without giving them any idea of how constrained they are by it.

Mnookin, predictably, started fumbling because the frame of the conversation had shifted from how I’d respond to the threat of my son’s murder to how the professor would deal with the logistical issues involved in getting the money. How he would solve my problems. To every threat and demand he made, I continued to ask how I was supposed to pay him and how was I supposed to know that my son was alive.

After we’d been doing that for three minutes, Gabriella Blum interjected.

“Don’t let him do that to you,” she said to Mnookin.

“Well, you try,” he said, throwing up his hands.

Blum dove in. She was tougher from her years in the Middle East. But she was still doing the bulldozer angle, and all she got were my same questions.

Mnookin rejoined the session, but he got nowhere either. His face started to get red with frustration. I could tell the irritation was making it hard to think.

“Okay, okay, Bob. That’s all,” I said, putting him out of his misery.

He nodded. My son would live to see another day.

“Fine,” he said. “I suppose the FBI might have something to teach us.”

I had done more than just hold my own against two of Harvard’s distinguished leaders. I had taken on the best of the best and come out on top.

But was it just a fluke? For more than three decades, Harvard had been the world epicenter of negotiating theory and practice. All I knew about the techniques we used at the FBI was that they worked. In the twenty years I spent at the Bureau we’d designed a system that had successfully resolved almost every kidnapping we applied it to. But we didn’t have grand theories.

Our techniques were the products of experiential learning; they were developed by agents in the field, negotiating through crisis and sharing stories of what succeeded and what failed. It was an iterative process, not an intellectual one, as we refined the tools we used day after day. And it was urgent. Our tools had to work, because if they didn’t someone died.

But why did they work? That was the question that drew me to Harvard, to that office with Mnookin and Blum. I lacked confidence outside my narrow world. Most of all, I needed to articulate my knowledge and learn how to combine it with theirs—and they clearly had some—so I could understand, systematize, and expand it.

Yes, our techniques clearly worked with mercenaries, drug dealers, terrorists, and brutal killers. But, I wondered, what about with normal humans?

As I’d soon discover in the storied halls of Harvard, our techniques made great sense intellectually, and they worked everywhere.

It turned out that our approach to negotiation held the keys to unlock profitable human interactions in every domain and every interaction and every relationship in life.

This book is how it works.

THE SMARTEST DUMB GUY IN THE ROOM

To answer my questions, a year later, in 2006, I talked my way into Harvard Law School’s Winter Negotiation Course. The best and brightest compete to get into this class, and it was filled with brilliant Harvard students getting law and business degrees and hotshot students from other top Boston universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts. The Olympic trials for negotiating. And I was the only outsider.

The first day of the course, all 144 of us piled into a lecture hall for an introduction and then we split into four groups, each led by a negotiation instructor. After we’d had a chat with our instructor—mine was named Sheila Heen, and she’s a good buddy to this day—we were partnered off in pairs and sent into mock negotiations. Simple: one of us was selling a product, the other was the buyer, and each had clear limits on the price they could take.

My counterpart was a languid redhead named Andy (a pseudonym), one of those guys who wear their intellectual superiority like they wear their khakis: with relaxed confidence. He and I went into an empty classroom overlooking one of those English-style squares on Harvard’s campus, and we each used the tools we had. Andy would throw out an offer and give a rationally airtight explanation for why it was a good one—an inescapable logic trap—and I’d answer with some variation of “How am I supposed to do that?”

We did this a bunch of times until we got to a final figure. When we left, I was happy. I thought I’d done pretty well for a dumb guy.

After we all regrouped in the classroom, Sheila went around the students and asked what price each group had agreed on, and then wrote the result on the board.

Finally, it was my turn.

“Chris, how did you do with Andy?” she asked. “How much did you get?”

I’ll never forget Sheila’s expression when I told her what Andy had agreed to pay. Her whole face first went red, as if she couldn’t breathe, and then out popped a little strangled gasp like a baby bird’s hungry cry. Finally, she started to laugh.

Andy squirmed.

“You got literally every dime he had,” she said, “and in his brief he was supposed to hold a quarter of it back in reserve for future work.”

Andy sank deep in his chair.

The next day the same thing happened with another partner.

I mean, I absolutely destroyed the guy’s budget.

It didn’t make sense. A lucky one-off was one thing. But this was a pattern. With my old-school, experiential knowledge, I was killing guys who knew every cutting-edge trick you could find in a book.

The thing was, it was the cutting-edge techniques these guys were using that felt dated and old. I felt like I was Roger Federer and I had used a time machine to go back to the 1920s to play in a tennis tournament of distinguished gentlemen who wore white pantsuits and used wood rackets and had part-time training regimens. There I was with my titanium alloy racket and dedicated personal trainer and computer-strategized serve-and-volley plays. The guys I was playing were just as smart—actually, more so—and we were basically playing the same game with the same rules. But I had skills they didn’t.

“You’re getting famous for your special style, Chris,” Sheila said, after I announced my second day’s results.

I smiled like the Cheshire cat. Winning was fun.

“Chris, why don’t you tell everybody your approach,” Sheila said. “It seems like all you do to these Harvard Law School students is say ‘No’ and stare at them, and they fall apart. Is it really that easy?”

I knew what she meant: While I wasn’t actually saying “No,” the questions I kept asking sounded like it. They seemed to insinuate that the other side was being dishonest and unfair. And that was enough to make them falter and negotiate with themselves. Answering my calibrated questions demanded deep emotional strengths and tactical psychological insights that the toolbox they’d been given did not contain.

I shrugged.

“I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-ended questions over and over and over and over. They get worn out answering and give me everything I want.”

Andy jumped in his seat as if he’d been stung by a bee.

“Damn!” he said. “That’s what happened. I had no idea.”

By the time I’d finished my winter course at Harvard, I’d actually become friends with some of my fellow students. Even with Andy.

If my time at Harvard showed me anything, it was that we at the FBI had a lot to teach the world about negotiating.

In my short stay I realized that without a deep understanding of human psychology, without the acceptance that we are all crazy, irrational, impulsive, emotionally driven animals, all the raw intelligence and mathematical logic in the world is little help in the fraught, shifting interplay of two people negotiating.

Yes, perhaps we are the only animal that haggles—a monkey does not exchange a portion of his banana for another’s nuts—but no matter how we dress up our negotiations in mathematical theories, we are always an animal, always acting and reacting first and foremost from our deeply held but mostly invisible and inchoate fears, needs, perceptions, and desires.

That’s not how these folks at Harvard learned it, though. Their theories and techniques all had to do with intellectual power, logic, authoritative acronyms like BATNA and ZOPA, rational notions of value, and a moral concept of what was fair and what was not.

And built on top of this false edific...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The New Rules
• Chapter 2: Be a Mirror
• Chapter 3: Don’t Feel Their Pain, Label It
• Chapter 4: Beware “Yes”—Master “No”
• Chapter 5: Trigger the Two Words that Immediately Transform Any Negotiation
• Chapter 6: Bend Their Reality
• Chapter 7: Create the Illusion of Control
• Chapter 8: Guarantee Execution
• Chapter 9: Bargain Hard
• Chapter 10: Find the Black Swan
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Prepare a Negotiation One Sheet
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher