Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It

Great book. Very practical. Easy to read.

Excellent for learning to communicate WITH others!

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I purchased and read this book roughly 4 years ago- I use tools from this book in my life everyday both personally and professionally as a sales leader. I have returned to it to review some of the lessons and recommend it to everyone I know.

This book has allowed me to see how I negotiate. Also, has taught me how to change tactics and apply pointers given. I have applied some of the strategies and they have worked in my day to day negotiations. This is a great read and I love how each of the points given are followed up my real live scenarios.

Loved this book and will come back many times in the further to refresh my memory. Definitely worth the read.

Loved this and the examples. Especially relating criminals to business people.

This is the most useable book I’ve read thus far and it’s opened my eyes to how poorly we communicate as a whole. Everyone is desperate to be heard and giving them that chance opens them up and can teach us so much about who we’re dealing with.

This book tells us that we shouldn't avoid conflict. Conflict, a healthy one, is an engine for better relationship and result in general.Remember, this book isn't about how to manipulate your counterpart. For me, this book is about how to embrace every conflict—difference of interest—and bring it to the brighter condition for each side.

I'm usually a fiction reader, read this because it was a book club choice, but I found to be interesting, fairy easy to read and I learned a few things.

Highly recommend for everyone. Content is clear and concise. All of the tips are practical. This book allows me to push past the fear of conflict.

This was a really great book, one of the best I have read in a long time. I intend to study it and master all of the lessons that he has included. It was a fascinating read-- as a top FBI negotiator-- how do you reason with crazy criminals who want to kill others in a hostage situation?

"Never Split the Difference" is an informative and well-written guide to the art of negotiation, offering practical strategies drawn from the author’s experience as an FBI hostage negotiator. Chris Voss breaks down complex negotiation tactics into clear, actionable steps that feel both easy to understand and applicable in real-life scenarios. While a few examples felt somewhat repetitive, causing the pacing to drag slightly at times the overall content remains highly engaging and valuable. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it to anyone looking to improve their communication and negotiation skills.

Negotiation is a fundamental skill, whether in the boardroom, buying a car, or even deciding where to go for dinner. Chris Voss's "Never Split the Difference" immediately grabs attention with its subtitle, "Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It," a nod to the author's background as a former FBI lead international hostage negotiator. This book promises to unlock persuasion potential by applying high-stakes techniques to everyday professional and personal interactions. Having heard considerable buzz about Voss's approach, I was eager to delve into his strategies.Key Concepts and Themes:Voss's central premise challenges the traditional, purely rational approach to negotiation often taught in business schools. Instead, he argues that emotions are not obstacles but pathways to understanding and influence. The book is built around several core techniques borrowed from hostage negotiation:Voss emphasizes truly listening to understand the other party's perspective and validating their emotions, even if you don't agree with them. Techniques like "mirroring" (repeating the last few words the other person said) and "labeling" (identifying and acknowledging their emotions) are powerful tools for building rapport and gathering information.The Power of "No": Contrary to conventional wisdom that pushes for "yes," Voss explains why getting a "no" can be a valuable step in the negotiation process, making the other party feel in control and opening up possibilities.Calibrated Questions: Using open-ended questions starting with "how" or "what" to subtly guide the other party towards your desired outcome without being aggressive.Bending Reality: Techniques like anchoring and strategic uses of deadlines to influence the other party's perception of value and time.A systematic approach to making offers and counter-offers that involves calculated concessions.What makes Voss's methods stand out is their foundation in real-life, high-pressure scenarios where failure had dire consequences. This lends a unique weight and credibility to the techniques presented.Writing Style and Readability:The book is highly engaging, written in an accessible, conversational style. Voss weaves in compelling anecdotes from his time in the FBI, illustrating the techniques with gripping stories of hostage standoffs and criminal negotiations. This makes the concepts much easier to grasp and remember than purely theoretical explanations. While the subject matter is serious, the writing keeps you hooked, feeling more like a thrilling narrative at times than a dry business book.Practical Application:One of the book's greatest strengths is its focus on practical application. Each chapter breaks down a specific technique, explains the psychological principle behind it, and provides clear examples of how it was used in high-stakes situations, followed by how it can be adapted to business or personal life. While applying techniques honed in life-or-death scenarios to everyday conversations might sound intense, Voss does a good job of translating them into less dramatic contexts. It requires conscious effort and practice, but the examples make it clear how to start implementing them. I found myself immediately trying some of the listening and labeling techniques in conversations, and noticed a difference.Strengths:The insights from hostage negotiation provide a fresh and powerful take on persuasion.Highly Practical Techniques: The book offers actionable strategies that you can start using immediately.Engaging Storytelling: The real-life anecdotes make the concepts memorable and the book a pleasure to read.Focus on Emotional Intelligence: Emphasizes the critical role of understanding and managing emotions in negotiation.Empowering Message: Provides readers with tools to feel more confident and in control during difficult conversations.Criticisms:Intensity of Techniques: Some readers might find certain techniques feel manipulative or overly intense for casual interactions. Voss addresses this, stressing the importance of genuine empathy, but it's something to be mindful of.Reliance on Anecdotes: While the stories are engaging, some might wish for more data or research backing up every single claim, although the FBI's success rate serves as strong practical validation.Conclusion:"Never Split the Difference" is a transformative book on negotiation. By drawing on his unparalleled experience, Chris Voss provides a compelling argument for prioritizing emotional intelligence and active listening in any persuasive interaction. The techniques are counter-intuitive at times but profoundly effective when applied thoughtfully. While the intensity of their origin might require conscious adaptation for everyday use, the core principles of understanding the other side deeply are universally valuable.This book is highly recommended for anyone who wants to improve their negotiation skills, whether in business, sales, management, or personal relationships. It's not just abo...

Everything we assumed we knew was wrong” (p.26), we are not rational, compromise is terrible, and “No” is the answer to getting what you want in and out of the office. These are all concepts that the reader can be expected to wholeheartedly believe and understand by the end of this book. Former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss hit the mark with this book, sharing effective tips and tools for negotiating in and beyond your workspace. “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as Your Life Depends on It” is a 5-star read for those trying to enhance their “deal making skills” whether that be with work or personal relationships. Prior to 2008, Chris Voss was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. According to The Black Swan Group, through his 28 year with the Bureau, he was trained in negotiation by the FBI, Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. Chris has taught business negotiation in the MBA program in several of the world’s best universities and business programs. Voss continues to host seminars and attend guest lectures and is rumored to be working on additional books. “Never Split the Difference”, a euphemism for “never compromise” because compromise on the street often leads to the loss of lives, Was published in May of 2016 and is an extremely powerful book that tells the stories of negotiation when you really can’t afford to lose, like in a situation where you are negotiating for the lives of others. Each chapter includes engaging theories on communication and actionable recommendations on how to improve your communication skills, while telling intriguing stories of the life of an FBI agent. These stories include bank robberies, terrorists and a bunch of different “bad guys”. This book will not only help your business deals, but your personal relationships as well. Voss gives us more than just the advice on what to do, he shows us why they work as well.This book is a fun read full of useful information. The new concepts in every chapter had me highlighting the techniques and lessons that I truly wanted to remember. The most important to me, being that you should never be so eager to solve a conflict that’s result is inconvenient for you. Accepting bad deals is almost always a mistake. Compromise isn’t always the answer, while pushing for a hard “yes” doesn’t get you any closer to a victory, it only angers the other party. And finally, “Driving towards “that's right” is a winning strategy in all negotiations. But hearing “you're right” is a disaster.” (p. 105) Overall this is a wonderful book that teaches the reader that negotiation, at its core, is nothing more than conversations with reactions and results. Getting what you need from others will help set up the rest of your life. Chriss Voss will teach you how to take authority and show dominance in the conversations that will make or break your career. Because of the strong lessons in this book, I believe it would be a great book for most young people to read. Whether they are beginning their college career or creating their own blue-collar business, “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss is a great resource for people looking to better their life without looking for a designated “self-help” book. Remember: “... without self-control and emotional regulation…” (p 156) these strategies will not work.

One day a couple of months ago, it occurred to me that day that my job requires me to do a lot of negotiating. With this in mind, I decided I should invest some time in learning how to negotiate better. After looking around some online, I picked up Never Split the Difference. I’m really glad I decided to read this book. It provides practical instruction on how to negotiate that I’ve already been able to put into practice.The author, Chris Voss, is a former FBI hostage negotiator and is clearly someone who has been personally involved in hundreds if not thousands of negotiations. This is what makes the book worth reading — Voss is like an expert mountain guide who can gives you not just advice on what route to take up the mountain, but how to wear your pack so it sits correctly on your back and what to bring with you so you stay warm and dry. It’s much less about grand negotiation strategy and much more about what to do when you’re in the thick of it and your heart starts pounding.In the same way that the Jane Jacob’s classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities starts with how large a sidewalk should be and builds up into how to manage a thriving, growing, city, Never Split the Difference starts with how to listen (very closely, preferably with multiple people to compare notes) and talk in a negotiation. Not even what to say at the beginning, but literally the tone of voice you should use regardless of what you’re saying (Radio FM DJ voice).From there, it moves into the building blocks of a conversation within a negotiation. One tactic that has stuck with me is mirroring, where you take a fragment of what someone said and repeat it back to them as a question (e.g., “as a question?”) so they feel the need to explain themselves. Another is labeling, where you attribute a thought or an emotion to your counter party (e.g., “It seems like you’re frustrated). I like those one because it can be used both to build rapport or to non-confrontationally confront an antagonistic counter party.I think there’s a real benefit to the ground up style of teaching used in this book. The vast majority of negotiations I face in my job are not formal negotiations (e.g., over a salary), but informal ones (e.g., is Project A more or less important than Project B?). These informal negotiations are hard to apply a lot of conventional negotiating wisdom too; if this were a book only about how to haggle over the final price, I wouldn’t be able to use much of it. Mirroring and labeling, however, are things I’ve been able to work into my day-to-day already.Perhaps the most useful part of the book are calibrated questions. Voss suggests using “How” questions rather than statements, as they make people less defensive. Instead of directly countering your counter party’s demand, you ask them a “How am I supposed to do that?” This shifts the terrain of the conversation, forcing them to negotiate against themselves and/or solve your problem for you. If you were to shorten the book down to a single sentence, it would be this: calmly ask your counter party how you’re supposed to take this deal rather than the one you want and wait for them to meet you there.There’s much, much more in the book. The key words to listen for to know that your counter party feels heard (“That’s right”), his method for haggling in a salary-style negotiation (the Ackerman Method), and a fantastic trick for getting people who have gone cold to respond. If there’s a downside to this style, it’s that I feel like I’ll have to re-read the book in a year or two, after I’ve gotten more comfortable using some of the basic techniques, to get the most out of it. Definitely recommended!

Sometimes I feel like I buy books more often than I actually read book. It's not that I don't like reading, I do. I also love the idea of reading.That said, this book was something that once I started reading, I couldn't put down. Chris Voss is a master in the art of negotiation, and his steps are both simple enough to follow and understand, but also tied to real world examples he talks about. In every chapter he talks about some of his biggest failures and greatest successes, and how he took to negotiation and the concepts that came with it.If you want a story, while I was reading this book, I was going through a very tough point in my career. For several years I had worked in a department that was basically seen as the baby in the company, on a side-project that while lucrative had just 30 clients where our main products had over 1,000. My boss for years barely noticed me or what we did in our department, he managed two products himself, the bigger of the two in the larger customer base. For 3 years, I basically ran everything in the department, doing what I needed to do, being the go-to for people well above my role in anything my product needed. I enjoyed it. Eventually the company started to take note of this products success, and wanted to ramp it up. My boss, eager to take credit for the departments success, started taking a more active role, despite having almost little to no understanding of what we actually did. He was making questionable decisions and often impossible requests that highlighted just how little he knew. He was impossible to work with in this, because he was very much a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy when it came to management, and would get frustrated by anything other than a firm yes to a request. In short, he was tanking the department I sunk my last 3 years in, and making my life miserable having to constantly either shoulder or make up for his unusual requests. Everything became a fight, including at one point a simple request for me to focus my time on a large project for a client I was traveling to visit in 3 days became a no (because it wasn't his idea) and ended with him hurling papers around the room and throwing me out of his office. He was a bad manager, a traffic cop who you'd only hear from when he thought you were doing something wrong, but like many people can relate to, he was also *my* manager, and he wasn't going anywhere. I had to do something about it.The book had many situations that related to the situation I was going into. A stubborn, unreasonable person, but at least they weren't holding anyone at random. In many ways, I was doing things that may have seemed like to my boss that I was undermining him. Chris Voss talks about the same story of a brilliant young agent who earned the ire of a field office director (and that agents direct supervisor) for a similar situation. Chris talked about a situation where the agent came to him for help in needing to discuss with their boss a request they knew would have sank like a lead balloon on any good day. I was in that same situation. Chris described the techniques needed to discuss the issue with their boss. It worked.I tried the same techniques. The next time an impossible request came through, I discussed it with my manager. I started with "I'm sorry," one of the things Chris talks about in his book. I followed in so many words with "how am I supposed to do that?" I made my problem *his* problem. It was now his job and his responsibility to solve the issue he presented in his request. All without him knowing that just happened. It sounds so deceptively stupid, I thought starting off with "I'm sorry" and asking "how am I supposed to do that?" would be seen as oppositional, but you know what? It actually worked. He didn't know how to solve the problem he just gave me. We talked about it and floated solutions, and I planted the seeds in his head on alternatives, using other techniques described in the book. The discussion ended with him basically saying "that's right" and I got the solution I wanted out of the situation, and in the end, my boss left with the impression that it was his idea. That manager and I still never got along very well, and eventually he moved away from my department completely, but at least I had the tools needed for him and I to be able to communicate and work together.I'd have to thank Chriss Voss. The techniques in my book in my situation didn't save anybody's life from a kidnapper or get a bank robber to stand down, but it probably saved my career. This book is for everybody.

Let’s get this clear: You don’t get the life you deserve, you get the life you negotiate.That said, who better to guide you in the best techniques for negotiation than someone who was involved in genuinely high-stakes negotiating – world-class ex-FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss. Having seen too many B-Grade movies, your perception of dealing with hostage-takers, as was mine, may be assembling an armour-clad SWAT team, getting a clear head shot at the hostage taker, and rescuing the terrified victims.After seeing too many incidents end in disaster for the victims, the FBI turned to using very sophisticated negotiation techniques. Most business negotiators are raised on the “Getting to Yes” approach of Fisher and Ury. One of their keys to negotiating is the assumption that the other side is going to “act rationally and selfishly in trying to maximize their position.” Your task is to get as much as you can. The only people who come close to doing this are those negotiating with other people’s money and who will make an outsized commission irrespective of the outcome.The book’s title, ‘Never Split the Difference’, highlights the deficiencies in this approach. What is splitting the difference in a hostage negotiation? I’ll give you $5m instead of your asking price of $10m and you kill only 8 hostages and free 12?“Negotiation, as you’ll learn it here, is nothing more than communication with results,” Voss explains. The economist Amos Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the founders of the field of behavioural economics, won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that man is in fact, (and even in business,) a very irrational beast.The beauty of the method Voss teaches is how easy it is to grasp the basics, even if it may take years to perfect these techniques. The method Voss describes was developed because it is easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute. It was designed for police officers who weren’t interested in becoming academics or therapists. They simply needed a highly effective way of changing the behaviour of the hostage-taker, and to shift the emotional environment of the crisis just enough so that they can secure the safety of everyone involved.If indeed you don’t get what you deserve, only what you ask for, you have to ask correctly. So, claim your prerogative to ask for what you think is right.The centrepiece of this book, is ‘Tactical Empathy’ and it works. This doesn’t involve agreeing with the other person’s values and beliefs or giving out hugs, that’s sympathy.Tactical Empathy is contingent on active listening – listening hard and doing so in a relationship-affirming way. Active Listening involves techniques such as Labelling, Mirroring, Accusation Audit, silences and more. I will address only a few.Labelling is repeating your counterpart’s perspective back to them. You will be able to disarm your counterpart’s complaints by repeating them aloud. Labels almost always begin with the same words: It seems like … It looks like… It sounds like … and not “I’m hearing that …” The word “I” gets people’s guard up.There is enough research that indicates that the best way to address negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then label the negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts. “You seem disappointed that the price you were expecting to achieve is being rejected…” Then listen encouragingly so a solution can be found.There are three voices that are useful in a negotiation, one Voss calls the “late-night, FM DJ voice”: it is non-threating, soft, and calming. Talk that starts with “I’m sorry …” and a soft smile, makes people more open to creative solutions because their brains are not freezing in fear or anger.“Mirroring” is feeding back to your counterpart what they have just said. Not the body language. Not the accent. Not the tone or delivery. Just the words. Sometimes repeating only the last three words or the critical one to three words of what someone has just said, will produce the desired effect. Your counterpart will inevitably elaborate, and even reveal more information that will further fuel the negotiation. Mirrors work magic.By affirming what you are hearing, you are showing you understand (not support or concur with) your counterpart’s worldview.“It seems like you want us to let you go.” Or “It seems like you don’t want to go ahead with the sale under these conditions.” When they can say to you “That’s right…” you have connected in a meaningful way that will allow for the exploration of other options. If they had said, “You’re right…” more often than not, they are fobbing you off.“I always try to reinforce the message that being right isn’t the key to a successful negotiation—having the right mindset is,” Voss explains. Negotiation is not a battle between opposing forces.By doing an accusation audit in advance, you can often surface what is their concern upfront and eliminate it. When teaching negotiat...