Never Split The Difference

Never Split The Difference Full Chapter Brief

Negotiation is everywhere in your daily life: for example, asking your boss to raise your salary, persuading your children go to bed at 9 o’ clock, buying the things at the best price, and so on. All of these actions require communication between people. How do you achieve the desired outcome in a negotiation and convince the other party? In this book, Chris Voss outlines nine negotiation tips that you can apply to every situation in your life, and which will benefit you forever.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.

This book will teach you how to take control in essential conversations in your daily life. Chris Voss is a former FBI negotiator, who often negotiated with kidnappers to free hostages. Once, kidnappers asked the family of a hostage to pay a ransom of $150,000. The family told Voss that they could pay between $50,000 to $85,000. However, Voss successfully managed to lower the price to $4,751, and the hostage was rescued safely. This is only one of the many successful mediations he took part in, over his twenty years of experience, on the basis of which he created a solid theory which can be applied not only to international crises but also to situations that concern our families, careers, intimate relationships, and even parenting.

Voss is also the founder of the Black Swan Group, a Fortune 500 company, and has taught and given lectures at Harvard and MIT. The co-author of this book, Tahl Raz, is also the co-author of the New York Times’ best-selling column, Never Eat Alone, and a content editorial consultant at a number of companies.

If you are a regular user of our platform, you may know that we have unlocked a lot of books on negotiation methods. One of them, Getting To Yes, regarded as having “an unrivaled place in the literature of dispute resolution” introduces the Principled Negotiation, a method researched by the Harvard Negotiation Project. So, is there a difference between Voss’ theory of negotiation and the one introduced in Getting To Yes? There is. The book states that the negotiating parties are “rational actors”, while Voss’s theoretical approach assumes that they are irrational instead. The theory comes from the work of Daniel Kahneman, an American psychologist, who believes that humans have two thought systems: a System 1, which consists of our innate skills that we share with other animals, fast, intuitive and emotional; and a System 2, which is slower, strenuous and rational. Kahneman’s theories have already been covered in our bookey about his work Thinking, Fast and Slow. When putting Kahneman’s theory and negotiations together, the first step is observe and analyze one’s System 1, their emotions, reactions, and feelings. Then, questions can be asked in order to influence their System 1 and receive the desired reaction, granting the initiative to control the other party. In general, this is a kind of negotiation based on emotional control.

We will look at the specific negotiation methods in three parts:

Part One: How to quickly establish a harmonious relationship with the other party at the beginning of the negotiation;

Part Two: How to persuade others to get the results wanted in a negotiation;

Part Three: How to find out unknown information and ensure implementation after negotiation.