Quick review: Chris Voss - Never split the difference
Experience from an ex-FBI negotiator that never take no deal as an answer.
The author of the book, Chris Voss, is an ex-FBI negotiator and he means it when a lot of his case are no backing down - there aren’t no deal for him. There are only a deal or a bad deal. With that in mind, the book is a great insight on both on how to get a good deal on any negotiation & also the life stories of the time he need to solve not just cases, but more like a crisis at scale.
Negotiations needed to be done in war torn countries, where terrorist running rampant as they demand money for hostages. And the key to a lot of his success are an opening ear, “tactical empathy” & an open mind. Not only that but he also shows that for a lot of cases, there are black swan - the unknown information that you do not expect - turns up that can turn deals in ways he can’t comprehend. The books also shows advantages can be taken of on a few psychological bias that we all have: loss aversion ( how we perceive loss on a much greater scale than gain ), price fixation ( kinda like how coffee places set their price ), or assign specific meaning when we saw a non-rounded number. To list these are an easy task, but to remember and apply them on a stressful situations take skills.
Personally what I got out of this book is that by being empathetic, there are a lot of problem that can be solve much more quickly, efficiently than need things to relying on rules or more brute force methods. And not just in negotiation cases, there are a lot can be done when you do not accept a NODEAL and start to think more creatively to understand the person on the other side.