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

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great book on negotiations. I’ve read a lot of negotiating books. This books actually reviews many of the negotiation books of the past and describes how and why they were written and where they fail given current research and practice. The author is a hostage negotiator, and describes the book’s title as something that you tend to do with common business negotiations – splitting the difference – but that is something you can’t do when trying to free hostages – where “give me two and you keep two” is not a successful outcome. I really appreciated the way this book was written – going through the state of negotiation practice and theory during the author’s career. There were many changes in tactics, some quite drastic, and these are all explained. In a way, the reader grows in knowledge along with the author. In addition, the author provides long, detailed, and in some cases thrilling examples of his work with law enforcement, and mixes in examples from his students from the world of business, such as negotiating for salary. I listened to this on audio, but I will likely acquire a summarization of the book for reference. The concepts taught here would require practice to effectively use in your day-to-day negotiations, but they appear quite worthwhile.

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