Never Split the Difference

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss           Audio Book:  8 hours   Paperback: 288 pages        

Good read written by a former FBI hostage negotiatior out of Kansas City, MO, who now runs the Black Swan Group a consulting group that offers negotiating advice to groups world wide.    Chris Voss is also a sought after speaker and is a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown U’s McDonough School of Business.    The cases this man has been a hostage negotiator on are straight out of the news, he has been involved in some aspect of pretty much every major negotiating situation the FBI has dealt with during his career with them.    He discusses these events and gives the reader a clear view of both the hostage taker’s point of view and the tactic used to speak to each of the perpetrators in ways that has led to amicable release of hostages and lives saved.   He teaches you what verbal cues to listen for and how best to respond to make the other person come to your side of reasoning.    Once you learn the strategies involved in working out where the other person is coming from, if they are telling the truth or lying, even in dire circumstances amicable ends can be reached and the other person may even believe they reached the conclusion on their own without your swaying them in any way.   Now that is some trick to bring another person to your way of thinking and leave them thinking it was all their idea in the first place and you were the one that went along with them.    Not too shabby, Chris Voss.    He keeps things really interesting all the way through, whether citing cases he worked or helping the reader to understand the logic behind another person’s actions, words and/or reactions.   I bet his classes are fascinating.    This book will teach you a lot and will make you look at negotiating all things in a new light.