Never Split the Difference book review

I've taken several negotiation courses over my career, and they had little connection with negotiations in the real world. Then I read Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and it all made sense. Classes often emphasize taking the emotion out of the negotiation as much as possible. Voss' book centers the fact that everyone involved in the negotiation is a human being, and so everyone involved is influenced by their emotions.

Image from Voss' website

Overview

This book had a massive impact in how I approach negotiations. As much as we often strive to be logical creatures, we aren't, and the people who recognize that and can work with those emotions will be more effective. Working with emotions includes the willingness to put aside our embarrassment in many of these situations: let the silence stretch, and don't "negotiate with yourself" because you feel like you must be the unreasonable one.

I'm going to undersell the breadth of this book because I'm highlighting my takeaways and the most useful techniques I've deployed (often in brief one-shot very win/lose discussions). The book is also applicable to longer conversations and negotiations.

Salary Negotiations

I first deliberately used what I learned from Never Split the Difference when negotiating for a raise while transferring from Program Management to Supply Chain Management. Technically, it was a lateral move - I was staying at the same compensation level - and HR wanted to give me only a nominal raise (if that). I had recently stumbled across a slightly-outdated list of some coworkers' salaries when clearing out a former manager's office and so I knew that I was being under-compensated, and so I was pushing for something bigger.

Eventually, I discovered what Voss calls the "black swan" - something you don't know going into the negotiation, but upon its discovery changes the whole negotiation. In this case, HR was not authorized to grant me much of a raise, but it turned out I had been eligible for a 15% bonus plan for years and they could add that to my compensation package. Discovering the existence and eligibility of the bonus plan changed the negotiation and enabled me to turn it into a significant raise.

Car leases

Our most recent car lease similarly used Voss' techniques. My wife deserves the most credit for finding a Labor Day sale put out by the national manufacturer: that manufacturer's offer changed our starting position by several hundred dollars per month compared to the opening offer by the dealership. But from there we chipped away further, largely by being able to evaluate our own emotions to avoid giving away too much too quickly.

I don't like sitting in a hard seat in a dealership while the sales agent keeps going back to confer with their manager to demonstrate how hard they are considering our offer. But we accepted the discomfort and in the end I'm pretty confident we got a good rate: the planned residual value of the car after the lease is surprisingly high, which implies to me they had to juice that number to get their business model to close and enable them to take the deal.

Conclusion

This is the most useful book on negotiation I've ever read, it's among the top business-skills books I've ever read, and it has literally saved or earned me tens of thousands of dollars.