Never Split the Difference- Chris Voss

I like how this book is different from other books that I have read as part of my curriculum in my negotiation paper, back in college. While other negotiation books (for example- Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury) try to explain success in negotiation as a rational process, fitting the decision making into fancy frameworks like BATNA, ZOPA etc but Chris Voss explains the whole negotiation process as an irrational and emotional process, connecting to various psychological studies. What I like about this book is, it is very practical. Chris Voss was a lead hostage negotiator with the FBI for more than 20 years and now the founder of a company that trains his customers on business negotiations and this book is his personal experience from his hostage negotiations and his teaching.

How can hostage negotiation and business negotiation be a level playing field? Well, the decisions that we humans make everyday are subjected to a wide number of cognitive biases and heuristic errors. Simply put- how we think, how we feel, how we understand the world mainly form from the processes of chemical reactions in our brain and evolution. It is anything but rational and hence understanding human emotions is very important.

The most important takeaway from the book, probably is that great negotiation is all about great collaboration. Chris also notes that a great number of deals hinge on something outside money, often having more to do with self esteem, status and other non financial needs. So any tips on how we appeal to humans emotions and drive a successful negotiation?

1. Be empathetic in your conversations.This is the act of listening actively to your counterpart, understand their view points, acknowledge their emotions to influence their behaviour of decision making.

2. Have a cheerful voice and positive attitude. When you put people in a positive environment people tend to collaborate better and work towards solving a problem.

3. Interrogate and ask open ended questions (like why, what) and make your counterpart think and connect the dots inside their mind. People collaborate better when they think it is their idea rather than having someone say it to them.

4. Be fair, people will not like to deal with you if you aren't.

5. Humanize your interactions, in sales we often say that people like to buy from people.

6. Conflicts are a great way to energize the problem solving process, it improves collaboration so embrace them but resolve those conflicts and never make an enemy.

Integrate all these in your personality and be that person who wears a big smile always, who likes to have petty interactions, be it with your customer service rep, or road side vendors or hotel receptionist, give them something to enjoy from the conversation and get your own special price or discount!!