Summary: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - by Chris Voss

By EssentialInsight Summaries

"He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation" – Chris Voss

 

Summary of Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss

 

Chris Voss is an international negotiating practitioner. After his two-decade career as an international FBI negotiator, he recognizes the act of negotiating as a vital determinant of our ability to obtain the most from life. Hence, he feels compelled to share the most effective negotiation practices that have worked for the FBI throughout his career in the agency with global readers.

 

What to take from this book?

This book dwells primarily on the subject of tactical empathy. As opposed to the past belief about negotiation as a completely rational process, you will learn from this book how that emotions have a stronger influence on behavior rather than rational thinking. Consequently, you would master how to employ tactical empathy in influencing your counterpart's behavior by first influencing one's emotions.

 

Who is this book for?

Frankly, this book is for every human who breathes and lives on the surface of this Earth. As long you are alive, you will always come in contact with other humans like you. As Chris Voss has correctly recognized, negotiation takes place in almost all contexts of human interaction; hence, it is a must-have skill for everyone. This book covers major topics such as:

• Reading body language.
• Mirroring.
• How to label emotions.
• Detecting lies even in people's affirmations.
• Usage of calibrated questions.
• Bargaining hard and many more.

 

Added-value of this summary: 1) exclusive information to some of the mysteries surrounding major criminal cases solved by the FBI; 2) become a better negotiator in business, career, marketplace, personal relationships, or wherever you may find yourself; 3) saving time.

 

At Essential Insight Summaries, we pride ourselves in providing key points in life-changing books in the shortest amount of time. Our summaries focus on bringing vital information that enhances knowledge and understanding of a specific subject matter. We focus on the essentials to ensure you maximize knowledge in the shortest possible time.

 

Disclaimer: This comprehensive summary is based on Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and does not share any affiliation with the author or original work in any way or form. The summary does not utilize any text from the original work. We want our readers to use this summary as a study companion to the original book, and not as a substitute.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EssentialInsight Summaries
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393416609

Book preview

Chapter 1: The New Rules

Chris Voss opens this book by describing his first encounter with two highly decorated Harvard Law School Negotiating Professors renowned for their extensive knowledge and research in the field of negotiation theories. As an FBI agent, Voss was supposed to know next to little about negotiation compared to these Harvard professors. However, shortly after undergoing an impromptu negotiation test, he discovered that he may have really impressed these professors despite Voss’ lack of formal education in the act of negotiation. In fact, he was able to defeat the purpose of these professors’ test with the use of what he calls calibrated questions, one of the most effective tools used by the FBI in negotiating with their opponents.

Voss mostly possessed experiential knowledge gathered from more than two decades of negotiating with hostile opponents at the FBI. He decided to enroll in Harvard for a negotiation course because he admitted that he could still glean from the academic world of negotiation. After his time at Harvard, he believed that the FBI may have a couple of things to teach the world about negotiation since almost every kind of human interaction, be it business or social conversations, warrants negotiation.

The author further transports us back in time to examine the evolution of the combat method employed by law enforcement agencies in hostage: Voss examines the more diplomatic practice of negotiation which has yielded better results since its implementation. Voss notes four hostage taking events that occurred in the early 1970s which may have led to the turnaround in the way these situations are handled. Since then, hostage negotiation has evolved and more techniques are added every day.

The practice of negotiation gained notable recognition in 1979 with the founding of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Roger Fisher and William Ury, co-founders of the Negotiation project, authored the book Getting to Yes, which may have been the first book to truly address the subject of negotiation squarely. This book’s arrival was greatly welcomed by business leaders and authority figures in various fields. In sum, it portrays negotiation as a systematic process that requires the employment of rational and logical thinking to overcome the irrational impulses of the human mind. Fisher and Ury broke down the negotiation process into four basic steps which include:

Separating emotion from the problem;

Focusing on why the other party wants what is being demanded, rather than the object of the demand;

Determining a mutually beneficial scenario for all the parties involved and;

Setting agreed standards of evaluation for the solutions proposed.

Contrary to the underlying principle of negotiation proposed by Fisher and Ury, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, through years of research, disproved that human decisions can hardly ever be based on rational thinking alone. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains that humans arrive at decisions by a synergistic working of what he terms Systems 1 and 2 of the human mind. System 1, he posits, is the emotional component of the brain, the one affected by feeling and is prone to instinctive and irrational impulses; while System 2 embodies the rational and logical component. Kahneman further articulates that System 1 evidently has far more influence on System 2 in decision-making as it usually informs the rational thoughts later generated by System 2. Hence, he concludes in order to produce a desired effect in the mind of a negotiating party, appealing to the emotional component would be the first line of