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.
Chapter 9-AppendixChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Bargain Hard”
After setting his heart on buying a red Toyota 4Runner, Voss discovers that only one dealer in the area has the kind he wants in stock. At the dealership, Voss points out which car he wants; the salesman tells him that it costs $36,000. Voss offers to pay $30,000, saying he can’t afford to pay more. The salesman restates his original price but has no answer when Voss asks, “How am I supposed to do that?” After asking his boss for permission to lower the price, the salesperson makes intermediate counteroffers. Each time, Voss thanks him before reiterating his $30,000 limit. They accept his offer.
Most negotiations eventually reach a point of back-and-forth haggling. Different people have different styles of negotiation. After reviewing years of research, Voss and his son Brandon believe that most negotiators gravitate toward one of three approaches. Analysts are patient, diligent negotiators who sometimes fail to emotionally connect with their counterparts. Accommodators are quick to invest in building a relationship with a counterpart, but they sometimes allow fear of confrontation to prevent them from voicing their objections (195). Assertive negotiators are confident and direct, but they can appear harsh to others. Since each type values time and interprets silence differently, Voss emphasizes the importance of adapting your approach instead of assuming that your counterpart sees the world the same way you do.
Voss offers several tactics for maintaining boundaries during hard bargaining, to be used carefully. Avoid letting a counterpart catch you off guard with an extremely high or low offer. By responding to a low offer of $300 with his own request for $1,000, one of Voss’s students manages to convince a dean to provide $750 for an alumni event, $150 more than his goal. Showing anger can give you an edge, but it’s usually best to contain it. Avoid asking “why” questions, unless you frame it so that the question favors your position. Use messages starting with “I” to momentarily redirect a counterpart’s attention to your needs. Don’t become so attached to a deal that you can no longer walk away.
During a haggle, Voss suggests using what he calls the Ackerman method of bargaining, which involves planning out your initial offer, along with several marginal increases you can offer throughout the conversation, as fixed percentages of your target price, while using open-ended questions, nonround numbers, and nonmonetary items to win over your counterpart. Voss concludes with an experience from one of his students, who uses this pattern to negotiate a discount on his rent shortly after his landlord notified him of a rent increase.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Find the Black Swan”
In June 1981 William Griffin shoots and kills two people in his home and injures a third. He then runs a block to a nearby bank, shooting two more people along the way. Inside the bank he takes nine employees hostage. Over the next three-and-a-half hours, Griffin shoots innocent bystanders and police officers alike. At 2:30 p.m., Griffin instructs police to meet him in the parking lot at 3:00 for a “shoot-out.” At 3:00, Griffin instructs one of his hostages to walk to the glass doors at the front of the bank, where he shoots her. Griffin himself follows seconds later, knowingly pressing himself against the glass in view of a police sniper, who shoots and kills him. In retrospect, Voss points out that there were several signs that something unusual was going on, but because the officers missed them, their frame of reference for negotiation was limited.
Voss uses this story to illustrate that black swans—unimagined events previously thought to be impossible—sometimes do occur. Historically, in Western Europe, the phrase “black swan” referred something considered impossible—until a Dutch explorer spotted a black swan in Australia in 1697. Another way to think of them is as “unknown unknowns”—critical information that we don’t know we don’t know.
Black swans are useful because they can provide leverage. Positive leverage is the ability to offer or withhold a desired outcome. Negative leverage consists of threats to produce an undesirable outcome. Normative leverage stems from pressure to conform with social or moral expectations. To exert this kind of leverage, you must understand your counterpart’s religion (Voss uses the term broadly, referring to a worldview, theistic or not). Voss describes a March 2003 negotiation with a tobacco grower who threatens to set off bombs in Washington, DC, to protest certain agricultural policies. After two days of listening closely, Voss and his team recognize the farmer as a devout Christian, then use biblical language to encourage the farmer to stand down. He does so.
Studies show that appeals are more persuasive when the listener perceives similarity with the speaker, as when Voss wins a contract after using a word—“stewardship”—that carries emotional resonance for his born-again Christian counterpart. Understanding a counterpart’s religion gives a glimpse of their desires, as well as a framework for validating your behavior to them. Voss cautions against dismissing counterparts as “crazy.” Oftentimes, they are simply misinformed or face hidden constraints.
Uncovering black swans is easiest when you meet in person, so you can observe tone and body language. Unstructured time outside of formal negotiations is also significant.
Voss offers an example. Working in real estate, one of Voss’s students investigates a property for purchase. After realizing the property’s value, Voss’s student intentionally mislabels the owner’s reason for selling, trying to discover the real reason. The broker reveals that the owner needs the money to pay off other properties. Aware of this constraint, the student negotiates a much lower price.
Voss concludes with an invitation for readers to embrace negotiation, despite fears, to uncover value for themselves and society at large.
Appendix Summary: “Prepare a Negotiation One Sheet”
Voss lays out a method for preparing a short document, or “one sheet,” that contains all the tools you intend to use within a negotiation. This document should include five sections: a goals section, where you write down an ambitious desired outcome; a summary section, where you include what you know so far; an accusation audit, which lists complaints your counterpart might make, along with labels you might use; a list of calibrated questions to ask; and a list of noncash offers.
Chapter 9-Appendix Analysis
After the smooth and natural accumulation of negotiation topics and techniques in Chapters 2-8, Chapter 9 appears as something of an outlier. It doesn’t necessarily follow logically from Chapter 8, which deals with implementation of a deal, as most back-and-forth bargaining typically precedes execution of a deal. Instead, this chapter contains a few snippets of advice and insight that didn’t fit elsewhere. It also contains fewer original ideas from Voss than prior chapters, which is not surprising, since the hard bargaining it discusses is one of the most studied (and feared) aspects of negotiation. Here, Voss abandons the role of iconoclast for that of tour guide, pointing out the best of what has been discovered, including the Ackerman system, while offering takeaways from his study of existing research on negotiation styles.
In Chapter 10 Voss resumes a more active role. Though he did not originate the black swan theory, he is responsible for applying it within the context of negotiation. The scene that opens the chapter, which follows Griffin’s hostile takeover of the bank, appears calculated to contrast with the scene that opens Chapter 2, which follows a bank robbery. Whereas both crises yield secrets that might be considered black swans, the latter episode is more shocking since it seems to lie outside of any typical frame of reference for negotiation. Griffin, unlike the bank robbers, is not motivated by money or political ends. His behavior is so out-of-bounds that it redefines not just that negotiation but also negotiation itself, at least for Voss, who is inspired to seek out black swans from then on. By positioning this chapter last and making it longer than any other, Voss hopes to push readers toward the same epiphany; as Voss explains, searching for black swans has more to do with mindset than technique. Thus, this concept applies to and underlies all the other strategies and tactics that precede in the book. Voss’s final anecdote, about the discovery that a lucrative property was being sold to make up for losses elsewhere, reinforces this notion, since that discovery is made by labeling.
