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book summaries by Cedric Chin

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz · 21 Mar 2017 · Buy from Amazon
Ongoing

I first heard about this book from a Google talk a friend shared with me. Chris Voss was a former FBI hostage negotiator, now turned consultant and academic lecturer. The main title of this book reflects his belief that 'compromise' is a terrible thing in negotiation – there is no such thing as compromise in a hostage negotiation situation, after all.

The book covers a whole series of psychological manipulation tricks the best negotiators use to get what they want. They all have their roots in the work of Kahneman and Tversky – that is, pure economic calculations fail when up against a skilful cognitive bias manipulator. That is not to say that Voss went into academia to find techniques that worked; most of these techniques were discovered over the course of repeated mistakes in the field. Later, Voss must've combed through the literature for probable explanations of why they work.

There's an element of 'us practitioners vs them academics' in the book; Voss opens up with a surprise assessment from some Harvard business school negotiation experts, where he holds his own against them, easily. Voss also thinks that many of the theories taught in negotiation courses in B-School are overrated and ineffective (in particular, he attacks BATNA as ineffective in getting the best possible deal).

Things covered in this book: how to haggle, how to anchor a counterpart, how to prevent a counterpart from being in control, and how to change a counterpart's mind without seeming to. This is a great book, with techniques I'm already itching to try in my daily work.

Chapters

  1. The New Rules
  2. Be a Mirror
  3. Don't Feel Their Pain Label It
  4. Beware "YES" – Master "NO"
  5. Trigger the Two Words That Immediately Transform Any Negotiation
  6. Bend Their Reality
  7. Create the Illusion of Control
  8. Guarantee Execution
  9. Bargain Hard
  10. Find the Black Swan
  11. Appendix: Preparing a Negotiation One Sheet

1. The New Rules

2. Be a Mirror

3. Don't Feel Their Pain Label It

4. Beware "YES" – Master "NO"

5. Trigger the Two Words That Immediately Transform Any Negotiation

6. Bend Their Reality

7. Create the Illusion of Control

8. Guarantee Execution

9. Bargain Hard

10. Find the Black Swan

11. Appendix: Preparing a Negotiation One Sheet



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