I read by Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and reviewed it as part of my ongoing series.

Quick review: This is one of the better ‘business’ books I have read thanks to fascinating stories, a counterintuitive message and immediately useful and actionable suggestions. The author, Chris Voss, was an FBI negotiator dealing with negotiations most of us are unlikely to ever encounter: hostage situations. In a very easy and surprisingly captivating read (it is a book on negotiation after all) he instructs on a negotiation strategy that most people don’t usually consider: getting everything you want. It makes sense — in a hostage situation you can’t ask for the full thing and settle for half. In order to do be successful a different approach is required, one centered around active listening, empathy and “calibrated questions” that serve to disarm the counterpart. Split out into 10 chapters, each begins with a story about one of Voss’ negotiations which are engaging, naturally chosen to make specific points through the book, but entertaining nonetheless. Never Split the Difference is worth picking up for anyone who actively spends time trying to negotiate with others whether professionally or personally. You’ll learn at least one thing that will help you.

Additional materials to complement your reading:

Youtube: Chris Voss and Sam Harris — Freeing the Hostages

Book Highlights:

…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.

It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted.

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators — they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover.

We are easily distracted. We engage in selective listening, hearing only what we want to hear, our minds acting on a cognitive bias for consistency rather than truth. And that’s just the start.

Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making.

Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation. It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other.

Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.

It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.

…you just saw, the beauty of going right after negativity is that it brings us to a safe zone of empathy. Every one of us has an inherent, human need to be understood, to connect with the person across the table.

“Yes” and “Maybe” are often worthless. But “No” always alters the conversation.

Instead, “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that scariness.

Using all your skills to create rapport, agreement, and connection with a counterpart is useful, but ultimately that connection is useless unless the other person feels that they are equally as responsible, if not solely responsible, for creating the connection and the new ideas they have.

…high-stakes world of crisis negotiation, the Behavioral Change Stairway Model (BCSM). The model proposes five stages — active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change — that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior.

I’m here to call bullshit on compromise right now. We don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie.

“If you approach a negotiation thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong,” I say. “That’s not empathy; that’s projection.”

Most people make an irrational choice to let the dollar slip through their fingers rather than to accept a derisory offer, because the negative emotional value of unfairness outweighs the positive rational value of the money.

Instead of asking some closed-ended question with a single correct answer, he’d asked an open-ended, yet calibrated one that forced the other guy to pause and actually think about how to solve the problem.

And the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

• What about this is important to you?

• How can I help to make this better for us?

• How would you like me to proceed?

• What is it that brought us into this situation?

• How can we solve this problem?

• What’s the objective? / What are we trying to accomplish here?

• How am I supposed to do that?

The Japanese have this figured out. When negotiating with a foreigner, it’s common practice for a Japanese businessman to use a translator even when he understands perfectly what the other side is saying. That’s because speaking through a translator forces him to step back. It gives him time to frame his response.

People always make more effort to implement a solution when they think it’s theirs.

And when you push for implementation and they say, “I’ll try,” you should get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Because this really means, “I plan to fail.”

When other people will be affected by what is negotiated and can assert their rights or power later on, it’s just stupid to consider only the interests of those at the negotiation table. You have to beware of “behind the table” or “Level II” players — that is, parties that are not directly involved but who can help implement agreements they like and block ones they don’t. You can’t disregard them even when you’re talking to a CEO. There could always be someone whispering into his ear. At the end of the day, the deal killers often are more important than the deal makers.

How does this affect everybody else? How on board is the rest of your team? How do we make sure that we deliver the right material to the right people? How do we ensure the managers of those we’re training are fully on board?

Either way, going at the same issue three times uncovers falsehoods as well as the incongruences between words and body language we mentioned in the last section.

We must let what we know — our known knowns — guide us but not blind us to what we do not know; we must remain flexible and adaptable to any situation; we must always retain a beginner’s mind; and we must never overvalue our experience or undervalue the informational and emotional realities served up moment by moment in whatever situation we face.

That’s why I say there’s always leverage: as an essentially emotional concept, it can be manufactured whether it exists or not.

That said, a word of warning: I do not believe in making direct threats and am extremely careful with even subtle ones. Threats can be like nuclear bombs. There will be a toxic residue that will be difficult to clean up. You have to handle the potential of negative consequences with care, or you will hurt yourself and poison or blow up the whole process.

Belonging is a primal instinct.

It is when we hear or see something that doesn’t make sense — something “crazy” — that a crucial fork in the road is presented: push forward, even more forcefully, into that which we initially can’t process; or take the other path, the one to guaranteed failure, in which we tell ourselves that negotiating was useless anyway. In their

People generally fear conflict, so they avoid useful arguments out of fear that the tone will escalate into personal attacks they cannot handle.

It’s not the guy across the table who scares us: it’s conflict itself.

Remember, pushing hard for what you believe is not selfish. It is not bullying. It is not just helping you. Your amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear, will try to convince you to give up, to flee, because the other guy is right, or you’re being cruel.