36 pages • 1 hour read
Chris VossNever Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Trigger the Two Words That Immediately Transform Any Negotiation”
The FBI’s Behavioral Change Stairway Model of negotiation seeks to influence a counterpart in stages: “active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change” (97). Voss shares an example: In 2000 a militant Islamic group in the Philippines takes American traveler Jeffrey Schilling hostage and demands a $10 million payment for “war damages.” Assigned to work with Filipino forces on the case, Voss finds that attempts to reason with Abu Sabaya, their counterpart, fall short because Benjie, the Filipino officer who speaks to Sabaya, fails to establish a sense of rapport. When Voss asks whether Benjie hates Sabaya, Benjie admits that he does and vocalizes his anger, allowing him to get past those feelings and become a more effective negotiator. Four months later, negotiations drag on. Hoping to defuse Sabaya’s insistence on receiving payment for war damages, Voss tells Benjie to employ active listening tactics discussed earlier, such as mirroring and labeling. After listening to and understanding Sabaya’s worldview, Benjie repeats it back to him, and Sabaya finally says, “That’s right.” After that, he no longer asks for money, and Schilling escapes.
From this experience, Voss highlights “that’s right” as a key phrase that signifies a turning point in negotiation. It should not be confused with “you’re right,” which can mask reservations. Voss tells how his son Brandon struggled adapting to a new role on his football team until Voss recognized and vocalized Brandon’s concern that dodging opponents (as his new role required) rather than hitting them directly was “cowardly,” earning a “that’s right” response from Brandon instead of the “you’re right” responses he gave earlier.
Voss concludes with examples of this principle in business negotiations. Working as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, one of his students convinces a formerly aloof doctor of the benefits of a new drug only after she listens to and summarizes the doctor’s approach to treating his patients. Another student secures his boss’s approval for his transfer to a different department in the company after uncovering and summarizing his boss’s hidden motivations for initially opposing the request. This breakthrough is especially surprising to the student, who considers his Korean culture to be tight-lipped.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Bend Their Reality”
In 2004 Voss is assigned to assist in negotiations for a series of kidnappings in Haiti. Voss and his team notice a pattern: Most kidnappings take place on Mondays, and the kidnappers grow anxious as the week goes on. Voss realizes that the kidnappers are not politically motivated; they simply want spending money for the weekend. Voss explains that most deadlines are arbitrary, and smart negotiators use them to apply pressure to their counterparts. By delaying negotiations until later in the week, Voss and his team win smaller payouts. One week, the panicked nephew of a kidnapped political figure is tempted to pay out most or all of the ransom money, but Voss explains that “splitting the difference” is a foolish approach (115), since it invites manipulation and leaves neither party satisfied.
Using a variety of techniques designed to “bend their reality” (126), the nephew (with Voss’s coaching) convinces the kidnappers to accept $4,751 instead of $150,000, their initial request.
Voss reviews several strategies for influencing a counterpart’s perception. First, he suggests anchoring expectations by acknowledging any negative factors up front. When it’s time to make an actual offer, it’s best to let the other side go first, since your counterpart may not have a good frame of reference and may make an advantageous offer as a result. When you do make an offer, you can soften the blow by mentioning a range of numbers. To make a specific offer appear deliberate, use odd numbers instead of rounding. To sweeten a deal on either side, you can ask for or offer nonmonetary conditions. Giving an unexpected gift can trigger a counterpart’s instinct to reciprocate.
Voss debunks the notion that there is an objective, fair solution to most problems. Instead, he cites a classroom activity—in which students are given $10 to split with a partner, so long as the partner accepts the split—to emphasize that perceptions of fairness are emotional and subjective. In negotiation, an appeal to fairness can function as accusation, justification, or, most effectively, as an invitation: “Please stop me at any time if you feel I’m being unfair” (125).
Voss concludes with three tips for negotiating a salary. First, practice “pleasant persistence” in search of nonfinancial benefits. Second, determine conditions for a future raise. Third, make it clear that your success will reflect well on the person hiring you, setting up a mentor relationship. Using these and other strategies from this chapter, one of Voss’s students manages to land a high salary after completing his master’s program.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
With one anecdote each from the political, personal, and professional spheres, Chapter 5 demonstrates Voss’s belief that the principles of negotiation can be applied in any situation, since human nature is universal, at least on average. This idea is extended in the discussion of the Korean student who finds that Voss’s technique helps him obtain information that would otherwise be hard to come by, due to cultural factors.
Structurally, these chapters follow the pattern identified earlier, in that they are sequenced in way that reflects their potential use in negotiation. Hearing “that’s right” as a response is a culmination of tactics discussed earlier that build rapport and uncover crucial information, a sign that the negotiator is on the right track. Having established such a relationship, the negotiator can then pivot from absorbing information to influencing a counterpart’s outlook, as discussed in Chapter 6. While this general pattern makes sense conceptually, readers should note that Voss repeatedly stresses the open-ended, improvisational nature of negotiation, so these and other steps need not be followed in any particular order.
In Chapter 6 readers learn why Voss is so opposed to “splitting the difference,” one of the most prominent clichés (or myths, as Voss sees it) about negotiation. His decision to title the book Never Split the Difference may be a conscious decision to provoke potential readers’ curiosity by upending a traditional belief, further evidence of iconoclastic intent. It also suggests that Voss’s opposition to a compromise-centric approach is not incidental but central to his thesis. If his overall argument is that the best negotiation requires real emotional connection, quick and easy compromises are the opposite: both parties perform a simple calculation to find the middle point without any real thought or effort.
