Chris Voss is the world’s leading expert on negotiation. He’s a former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator who’s handled some of the most intense, high-stakes situations in the world. He’s the creator of The Black Swan Method®—a powerful approach that takes proven hostage negotiation tactics and applies them to business and everyday life. Chris is the bestselling author of several books, including Never Split the Difference, and he’s taught negotiation at many top universities, including Harvard, Georgetown, and USC.
Chris joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss excellent negotiation, leadership lessons from his career, and more.
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Chris Voss On Never Split The Difference And World-Class Negotiating
Our quote for this episode is from Carrie Fisher. “Everything is negotiable. Whether or not the negotiation is easy is another thing.” My guest, Chris Voss, is the world’s leading expert on negotiation. He’s a former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator who’s handled some of the most intense high-stakes situations in the world.
He’s also the Creator of The Black Swan Method, a powerful approach that takes proven hostage negotiation tactics and applies them to business and everyday life. Chris is the bestselling author of several books, including Never Split the Difference, and he has taught negotiation at many top universities, including Harvard, Georgetown, and USC. Chris, welcome. It’s great to have you on the show.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
I always like to start with childhood. What was your upbringing like? I’m curious, did you have a formative experience that inspired your future in law enforcement public service, or were you an expert negotiator with your parents? Was this an early proclivity?
No. I wasn’t what you would call a combative, argumentative kid. Middle class, blue collar. My father was a small business owner, solo entrepreneur. He believed that his kids should go to work and earn their keep as much as possible, and figure stuff out. He’d give us tasks, clean up the yard, take out the trash, tear down the garage, figure it out.
First two are pretty standard. Tear down the garage, that’s a little more advanced.
It’s actually a bizarre part of his story. He decided he wanted a new garage, and the old one had to be torn down. I think it was about 11 or 12 at the time. My older sister, about a year and a half, two years older than me, he gave us both hammers and a crowbar and said, “Go in the backyard. Tear that thing down.”
I always joke that if you buy a six-pack of beer, you can get any of your friends to come do a demo with you. Tearing down is fun. Building, much harder.
Very true. It was a figure-out environment that I grew up in. My father was a blue-collar figure-out guy, very hardworking, high integrity, and aggressive. That was the environment we grew up in. It was an entrepreneur’s environment. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to figure it out.
JTTF To Hostage Negotiation: Managing High-Pressure Situations And Preparation
Your career started in New York in 1986, and you spent 14 years on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. I know you worked on some extraordinarily dangerous, high-pressure situations. How do you manage to walk in and out of that on a day-to-day basis? Does it carry with you when you leave work? That would seem really hard.
I think it’s a combination of three things. Number one, preparation practice. By the time I got hostage negotiation training, I’d spent a lot of time on a crisis hotline, which is the best emotional intelligence training you can get. I had been impressed with and worked by guys who were good at talking with people, talking to people, and converting sources. Already placed a high, a very high value on being able to talk with people in a non-threatening way. It was preparation overall approach. I felt there was a great endeavor. There was purpose there. Lastly, the most important thing is I just didn’t know any better.
I know a lot of your work these days applies to leadership. This is one, I think, that’s interesting. A lot of these multi-agency environments, different stakeholders, different agendas. We’ll get deep into the negotiation stuff, but I’m curious, what are some of the lessons from that experience that you find applicable to leading different stakeholders in maybe a little lower-stakes situation?
It’s crazy, in all human endeavors, it’s showing the other side that you understand where they’re coming from because the first thing is they’re never going to agree with you until they feel heard, until they know where they’re coming from and then showing it to them, saying it out loud. It’s astonishing. It seems so counterintuitive because it feels you’re not making your case. It feels like you’re making their case and somehow, you’re giving up ground.
It’s so counterintuitive, but that’s really it more than anything else. You are working with CIA on something. CIA is horrified at losing their intelligence gathering techniques and their operatives and their informants. CIA working with the bureau, we’re horrifying to them because we take stuff to trial, which means, ultimately, we’re going to reveal all our information and how we got it, and so that scares the hell out of the CIA.
If you want to get along with them, you could say to them, “Dealing with this is horrifying. You think we’re a bunch of boy scouts. You think we refuse to do anything wrong, and you think that we got to expose every asset, everything we’ve ever learned, and totally destroy your ability to gather evidence.” That’s their perspective. Whatever it might be, no matter how different it might be from yours. I never said I agreed with any of that, and I think that’s what people struggle with the most.
The Counterintuitive Secret To Winning People Over (And How It Made The Godfather)
I’m trying to recruit people who truly are Muslims from the Middle East to be witnesses in a terrorism trial in New York in the early ‘90s. I would say to them, “You believe that there’s been a succession of American governments for the last 200 years that have been anti-Islamic.” They’d be like, “Yeah.” That’s me letting them know I know what their point of view is now. I never said I agreed with it. I even started out by saying, “You believe.” That’s what really wins people over fast. It’s so counterintuitive.
People want to be heard. That moralistic programming or whatever it’s called, Delta Airlines did this to me. It probably was AI. I wrote in a letter, “This is the third time in a row that a plane’s gotten into midnight. There’s no one there at the gate. The bags don’t come. It’s unbelievably frustrating that you’re not ready for flights.” They basically wrote me back and just repeated everything I said, and I was like, “They get me.” “I understand you’re super frustrated that X, Y, and Z,” and even though it’s a tactic, it does work.
You want to be heard first. It always makes things better. It might not solve the problem, and in so many cases, it might be the final critical straw that solves the problem. And I give another example because it happens to be top of mind. I’m watching a docuseries about the making the movie The Godfather. My girlfriend Wendy and I were watching it. It’s a great series. The crazy thing about it is you’re watching a series and you think they’re never going to get this movie made. Point of fact, you’ve seen The Godfather, so you know they get it made.
Early on, they got ahead of an organized crime family in New York that’s opposing the making of the movie because the Italians are afraid that the book is defamatory against Italians. It’s what’s going on. Frank Sinatra hates the movie mostly because there’s a portrayal of an individual in there that bears a resemblance to him. The producers were sitting down with an organized crime boss in New York who has just looked him in the eye and said, “You are never going to make this move. I will not allow it.”
You’re making my point.
The guy says, “Okay, but just let me have my say.” Italian boss respects backbone. He leans back and he goes, “Okay, lay it on me.” He says, “You are an immigrant and you’ve never been given a fair shake. You’re tired of Italians who are trying to deal with the system that’s designed to keep them down.” At that moment, the boss decides he’s going to let him make the movie.
Those were the reasons why the boss was saying he didn’t want it made. It is like, “What’s the movie going to be about?” He says, “It’s going to be about an American family. It’s going to be about the American struggle. It happens to be said in this circumstance.” It’s a great series, and I’m sure it’s exactly how this thing went down.
Now the guy’s looking for a face-saving way out. Finally, he looks at him and the producer says, “What if I let you read the script? You read the script and if you want to make changes, you tell me what they are.” It was a previous moment when the guy said his perspective to them. You see Italians not being given a fair shake. You see a system designed to keep you down. That’s empathy. That’s just articulating the other person’s point of view. It’s a brilliant moment. I love it. I love the series. It’s great.
You’ve got to understand what’s important to the other person. I think that’s just constantly a failure.
That’s step one, but unless you articulate that understanding, they don’t know what’s in your head. If you say, “I understand where you’re coming from,” they don’t really know, but if you lay it out, that’s the action that’s required. Understanding is the first step, exactly what you just said, but without the second step, the other guy doesn’t know it.
Unless you articulate that understanding, they won’t know what’s in your head.
I think it’s interesting, some people just don’t want to talk to people. They don’t want to talk to people different. Let’s say there was a politician in the opposite perspective. If I wanted to counter that, I actually would want to deeply understand what they believe and why. It would actually help me. Having some curiosity around that would probably be helpful.
No probably. Absolutely, it would be helpful.
FBI Training Vs. Hollywood: What TV Gets Wrong About Hostage Negotiation
I know some of your early training came when you took hostage negotiation training at the FBI Academy in the ‘90s. That must have been fascinating. I’m curious of two things. One, what were some of the misconceptions you had about negotiating that training fixed or changed? Two, how much of what we see on TV is accurate?
TV’s horrible. The only thing that ever came close was the movie The Negotiator with Kevin Spacey and Samuel Jackson. I can’t remember the name of the director, for the life of me. I wish I had because the directors who really brought that story to life. That’s about 70%, 75% of the way there. There are a few critical moments in there that are just wrong, but the vast majority of movies and TV is just horrible.
Truck shows up, and they want to get the bank robber on the phone. They want to ask him what’s important to them. They want to stall them. It seems they all follow a similar script.
They don’t ask him what’s important to him. You start talking to him about what he’s going through. The original question, at the training. I’d already been volunteering on a suicide hotline for about two years when I got to our training. I remember literally thinking to myself, “I’ve been doing this for two years. I just didn’t have a SWAT team outside.” One of the things that I didn’t imagine, which my old boss, Gary, was very firm in us learning is some deals you’re never going to make. Point of fact, hostage negotiators are successful about 93% of the time. About 7% of the time, then ish. It is never going to happen. It’s going to go bad.
I want a plane with something on it in an hour. It’s not going to happen.
It’s like in 2004, Al Qaeda kidnapped Americans, and on one kidnapping, they said, “We want all the female Iraqi prisoners released from Iraqi jails in 72 hours.” Number one, the US government’s response was, “I don’t know if we have any females and it’s going to take us more than 72 hours to even figure that out, let alone let them out.” That wasn’t a negotiation. That’s the other side making a demand that could never be fulfilled.
What Gary was adamant on was recognizing what the earmarks are because they’re going to present themselves right away. The same is true in business negotiations, or even employer or employee negotiations. There are some types on the other side that are just never going to make the deal, no matter what you say. It’s their objective to make it go bad. What you’ve got to do is be able to recognize that person. If you look for the signs, you’re going to pick them up in the first 15 to 20 minutes.
What are some of the signs that someone doesn’t really want to deal and that you should just walk away?
They’re only focused on one thing because any great deal is a combination of terms. If they’re only focused on one thing, they got a hidden agenda, they’re trying to make you an example in some way. The first indicator is that they’re only focused on one thing. Your gut is going to tell you right away whether or not they’re playing you.
A lot of people who try to be fair-minded and quote open-minded will be like, “I would never act that, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.” Really manipulative people or have a highly developed instinct for finding your benefit of the doubt weakness and then exploiting it. They’re really good at it. If they can get you to doubt yourself, then they’re exploitive. They’re manipulating you.
Really manipulative people have a highly developed instinct for finding your benefit-of-the-doubt weakness and then exploiting it.
The Danger Of The Extreme Anchor: When To Walk Away From A Bad Deal
Let me ask you, in a business standpoint, I remember years ago, I sat down with someone and I was trying to negotiate with them. I’m a very straight-up person, and I understand there are a lot of pricing tactics. If you get into dollars, if I say $100 and person says $20 then I say $80, and then I say $70. You can tell the increments or whatever. I know around the edges.
What this guy said that he wanted was so egregious and over the top that I couldn’t even counter with anything. Maybe I was like, “The fact that you would even propose this, I don’t think you’re someone I could work with,” and I totally walked away. Is that what you’re talking about? I was like, “You’re not offering $1 million a year and I’m going to offer $100.” It’s so crazy that you seem irrational to me.”
That’s a tactic. Your instinct was dead on because there’s a truism of human nature, which is the best indicator of future behaviors, past behavior, so that guy’s always going to do that.
It turns out he was really pissed that he didn’t get the upside that he wanted in a company. I think he made a similar offer to 4 or 5 people, all told him the same thing, and he went into a different industry.
That’s exactly what happens if you extreme anchor. You either destroy the other side or you’re driving from the table.
That’s never a good tactic, an extreme anchor, or is it?
I completely believe it’s never a good tactic, but there are a lot of people out there who believe that it’s a good tactic because they remember that one deal where they slaughtered the other side and they don’t count the twenty deals that they lost that they should have made.
In terms of the training itself, what was something that was the opposite what you would’ve expected?
You really go into the training with the idea that you’re going to going to save everybody. You don’t become a hostage negotiator in your head for anybody to die.
Although 93% much higher than I would’ve guessed. That’s a pretty good rate.
It’s a good rate. It’s much higher than business percentages. The biggest thing was really reconciling this and I did early on. I think a lot of people kid themselves about it because the 93% success rate, then you’re going to get into double-digit cases before anything goes bad, just based on the numbers. You work 5, 6, 7 cases, which is a lot for a lot of people. You think everything you touch is going to turn out great. When one goes bad, a lot of people just can’t handle somebody get killed. It is hard, but if you realize from the outset that you weren’t going to win everyone, then you have to say, “I was warned.” Coming to grips with that is really the hardest part.
Uncovering The “Black Swan”: Finding The Hidden Leverage Point
In your first book, famous title, famous book, Never Split the Difference, it’s basically the modern negotiation bible. One of the key principles in the book is The Black Swan Method. Funny, I argue like it feels like the world is just full of black swans these days. Maybe they’re not so rare anymore, but you talked about finding these black swans and negotiation things that the other side is hiding from you. Can you give some examples of that, maybe both in the business world and not in the business world, what that looks like?
They’re hiding it, or they just don’t know what’s important, or they don’t know the impact on you. One of my favorite examples is a young lady early on when the book came out and I’m teaching at USC. She’s read the book. She’s making low budget films, but she’s a filmmaker. She’s working on another woman who’s got money as a funding source for a film. She just starts this conversation, and through the course of the conversation, exploring who the other person is.
The person who’s got the money mentions that she owns a chateau in France. My filmmakers, that’s her next film project, which could be the perfect setting for. Suddenly, they’re in a new conversation. This is a multi-picture funding deal. The chateau in France having it is worth a lot of money, which changes the financial dynamics on both deals instantly. It wasn’t really that she was holding it back, she just didn’t know it was important. There are two types of hidden information. The type the other side is holding back is afraid to tell you, which means it could change everything, otherwise, they wouldn’t be afraid to tell you.
It’s a liability. If it were an asset, they wouldn’t hold it back from you.
Maybe it’s stuff they just don’t think is important. That’s why you want to get into a larger conversation. It’s also why we don’t teach detecting deception per se, because for you to deceive me, you have to know it’s important. What happens if you don’t know? You’re not going to have any tells that tell me to dig in. That’s why much of The Black Swan Method is how to quickly find out a lot more about the other person without making the other person feel terrible.
I was just going to say, how did she find that out? Where did the chateau come up in the conversation? Was it because she asked smart questions or got to know her?
You get to know per a person faster, basically, with the two techniques we refer to as labels and mirrors. Labels looks it’s a verbal observation. A mirror is I repeat one to three words of what you just said. It could be the last three words, or through the course of the conversation, you say something like, “That time I was in France,” and there was something about the way you said that. I might say, “That time you were in France?” You’d be like, “Yeah, I was in France and I just left a chateau I have on a countryside.” “Wait a minute, chateau you have on a countryside?” That’s the way that stuff comes up.
Interestingly, what the mirrors and labels have in common is that you don’t make it about you, the person. It’s about them. I noticed and I heard or interesting.
What catches your ear or anything that stimulates your curiosity? That’s a gut thing, which if you start listening to your gut, your curiosity comes so easy. You just got to start listening, then you really accelerate things.
The Labeling Technique: Why Observations Are Better Than Questions
First, you have to ask questions, and then you have to listen. I think a lot of people are bad at both of those.
Here’s the crazy thing and I’ll make a distinction. Questions are not the best way to gather information.
Questions are not the best way to gather information.
Not talking is?
Actually, it’s going to be a label. For example, I do a training, me and Joe Polish and Nick Peterson. Three separate companies. We got this training thing we do through Joe called The Golden Swan. It’s a combination of three companies. Joe’s marketing, Nick is overall analysis and I’m negotiation. We sit down for training. I haven’t seen or spoken to Nick in weeks. I just look at him and I could have said, “How are you?” Which is a question, inquiring, heart in the right place, genuine. Instead, I look at him and I go, “You seem centered,” because I just sat there and I soaked him in for a second and then labeled what I was feeling. Nick is not a chatterbox.
Just an observation. It’s not a question. It’s the point. He sits there and he goes, “I just came off the mountain. Last time we spoke, I hadn’t been on the mountain in months. I’ve been working really hard. It’s been really hectic. When I go up on a mountain, I meditate. I practice my martial arts. There’s a lot of Eastern things that I’m into, which is philosophy, exercise, walking out, diet. I just came off the mountain and it’s the best I felt probably this year.” Massive amount of information from one label. Plus, if you think about everything they said, if you didn’t know Nick at all and you thought about everything that I said that he said, you could make a pretty good guess as to what this dude is like right now.
The label is picking up on something and the mirror is repeating something?
Pretty much.
I think a lot of people would picture negotiator. It’s associated with toughness and intensity. A lot of what you write and talk about is empathy in the equation, understanding the other side’s wants and needs. How do you do that? When you saw in the FBI, when you know the other party is just bad person, amoral, wants to do harm, is that harder or it just requires even, I guess, a dig deeper in terms of, again, why is this person even at this situation? Something must have gone wrong for them.
Empathy On The ‘Bad Guy:’ Negotiating With Immoral Or Violent Parties
There are some commonalities to all humans. There’s a hypothesis that’s out there that I realize is impossible to prove scientifically but I believe that it’s a valid hypothesis. The moment you’re born, I refer to it as original equipment. You come to earth with five-ish basic emotions. Anger, surprise, disgust, delight, fear are the basics. The psychologists that want to argue this point want to argue that there are only 4, there’s 5, there’s 6. It’s not joy, it’s happiness. They quibble over the number. They don’t quibble over the concept. As you go through life, feelings are the interaction of your emotions with your life experience. Social paths are created, not born.
Feelings are your emotions interacting with your life experience.
The FBI’s been trying to figure out what creates a serial killer. One of the hypotheses from a long time ago is six-year-old kid does something wrong, severely punished by the parent. A month later, they do it wrong, again, parent ignores it, doesn’t care. The takeaway for the kid in that moment is there’s no such thing as right and wrong.
Right and wrong or fair justice.
The issue is what happens to your life experience after you’re born. The original first principle is no matter who you are, you’ve got some basic emotions, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, happiness. The bank robbers got those emotions too. That’s my starting point, knowing that he has fear. He might not have guilt, he might not have compassion.
Before the turn of the 2000, there was the detachment disorder syndrome that they found in orphans. They found if you’re not held a lot in the first year of your life, you suffer from detachment syndrome. It’s what happened after you were born, how they adjust. Almost every orphanage around the globe now make sure that there are volunteers that come in and hold the infants multiple times during the day so they can develop the ability to attach.
My bank robber, he might have detachment disorder, but he still has fear. He might not be able to attach to people, but he still has fears. If he’s not suicidal in the beginning, and I’m going to find out if he is real quick, I’m going to ask him. We’ve got a set of emotions here that I can now deal with and navigate to get him out.
It’s interesting because from what I read too, people who survive being taken hostage somehow usually find a way to connect with the captors.
There’s different bonding stuff that’s crazy that happens. They originally called it the Stockholm Syndrome. The funny thing, if you hear any psychological or medical professional use the word syndrome, that’s code for, “We don’t know how it works, but we can no longer deny that it’s there. We’re going to call it a syndrome or the placebo effect. We don’t know how it works, but we can’t deny that it happens.”
Trade Wars & Tariffs: An Expert Analysis Of High-Stakes Political Negotiation Tactics
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask your opinion on this. There is a pretty high stakes negotiation happening now with the current administration’s trade and tariff policy. I’m curious. There’s people who think there is an idiot and a genius and the spectrum in between. From a negotiation standpoint, what do you think of this approach of threatening tariffs, pulling them back, threatening them again? Where does this fall in the playbook of negotiation?
First of all, let’s do a little comparison because I happen to be thinking about that.
I have to assume you’ve thought about this.
I like what the Trump administration is doing. First of all, let me be clear about that. One of the reasons I like it is compared to the old establishment, which are professional political trade negotiators, these guys that do treaties and do tariffs, they remind me a little bit of attorneys who negotiate not to get a deal, but to keep charging fees.
If an attorney makes a deal for you, he doesn’t get a bill anymore. He loses his job. If all the political negotiators of all the administrations, Republican and Democrat leading up to this, they really negotiated in ways to make sure that they remained employed, not that they made deals. Let’s contrast that to the previous world.
What do I do about what’s going on? People are finally catching on that Trump has no use for the old system of let’s keep our State Department economic negotiators employed for the next 40 years, trying not to get to a deal, or let me get involved. Let me take credit. The deal isn’t done until I’m involved. The world is finally getting that message that he’s got the last word and you let him take credit and you’ve got a pretty good deal as long as you don’t care that he claims credit.
Ronald Reagan said a long time ago, “There’s no limit to how far a man could go if he doesn’t care who claims credit.” Now, let him get involved. Don’t get bent out of shape about what’s in the press and treat him with respect. Apparently, he’s charming in person. There is nobody disputing that one-on-one. The Oval Office thing with Zelensky gets blown out of proportion. The media’s there. It’s like two kids’ gangs that are yelling at each other, egging each other on, and you turn around and four days after the pope’s funeral where Trump meets Zelensky in person, there’s a US-Ukraine deal over rare earth materials. Who cares who claims credit if he’s making deals?
His unpredictability, is that an asset in a negotiation or is that a liability?
You didn’t like what he said or did, but when was the last time you said, “I’m shocked that he tweeted out that he was mad at somebody. I’m shocked that on True Social, he criticized Vladimir Putin for launching drones on Ukraine.” No, you don’t like it but that’s the thing about Trump. Trump is eminently predictable.
When he says, “We’re there’re absolutely going to delay the tariffs,” and then he delays it, you think that’s just predictable?
He gives deadlines. He says, “This is when this is going to happen. If you don’t deal with us, this is when this is going to happen.” As a matter of fact, if you screw around, then I’ll even shorten the deadline. If you don’t engage in a process, this is when this is going to happen.”
Predictably Unpredictable: Is Extreme Rhetoric An Effective Tactic?
Do you think it’s effective what he’s doing from a tactic standpoint?
What are the outcomes?
There’ve been some deals, but with China and the big ones, we don’t have resolution yet. It seems he wants to make a deal, but from what I can see, he’s using the extreme rhetoric to try to get to a deal. He seems like has people at the table. I think the book’s still being written, but yeah, the conversations are happening.
First of all, how much of it is win? The news on Russian and Ukraine. He gets inaugurated in January 2025, by August, not the progress that he claimed he would make compared to the progress that was made under the Biden administration. Some of it is let’s compare what’s being accomplished versus the reality of what wasn’t happening previously as opposed to the ideal.
The emotional piece. We can use him as an example, but in general, he’s very emotional. Do you want to be emotional? Do you want to be predictable? How much do emotions get in the way of negotiation and tactics?
Let’s drill down on this a little bit. When you say emotional, describe the emotions.
Things that you would tweet.
Threatening rhetoric?
Threatening, anger, taunting a little bit sometimes, maybe.
This is the other thing that I found fascinating. Take it in total context and comparison. I took game theory in when I was working on my Master’s at Harvard. I know that sounds arrogant, but believe me, it’s not. The fact that I got into Harvard at all is a whole separate issue. Game theory class. I’m at the Kennedy School of Government. Everybody fancied themselves. A political operative wants to take a game theory class because what they want to do is they want to is they want to rig the game in plain sight. That’s what political people tend to do, rig in plain sight.
They’re talking about back-and-forth negotiations and they say, “The ultimate gain theory move is tit for tat. Somebody slights you, you slight them back equally. Somebody does something nice to you, you do something nice to them back equally. You condition them. Whatever they do, they’re going to get it in return.” You’re trying to get them to make the first positive move. You follow with a positive. Supposedly, there’s an upward spiral. Tit for tat. It doesn’t work in real life.
Game Theory Debunked: Why ‘Tit-for-Tat’ Fails In Real-World Conflict
Right, because I was going to ask you what flips the negative spiral, because we got there for a week with China. “It’s 50, it’s 100. You’re 100. Now we’re 300.” No one was willing to call it up.
That’s why tit for tat doesn’t work in real life. Trump’s game theory, massive retaliation, which is always predicated on, and I know this sounds childish, and Anderson Cooper called him out on this and said, “That’s a five-year-old’s response,” when he ran it the first time. You throw a rock at him and he responds with a full nuclear attack, massive retaliation. If you dig deeply into it enough, you’ll find that everybody he’s ever been in a dispute with threw the first rock.
He doesn’t start trouble, but boy, does he follow up if somebody starts it with him. He has no mercy. He doesn’t care who you are. His rule is, “I don’t care who you are or why you did it, and when you start with me, I’m coming back.” What he does then is these make examples of people, which is very intimidating, but is it a good idea to throw a rock publicly? When you start stripping it down to first principles, it becomes a different conversation.
In most leadership things, I assume, and this is a little bit different. Maybe it’s not different when we have to deal with these countries, but I assume you’re on the other side of a table of someone for whom like, when the negotiation’s done, you’re going to have to work together or have a relationship or an acquisition. Some of these things could hurt the post-life of the negotiation.
With his approach also that I like is that and a deal till he says it’s a deal and he seals the deal, and all the indicators are one-on-one, in person, he’s charming and warm. The thing with Zelensky really jumped out at me about that because the Oval Office thing was not one-on-one. JD Vance was there, Right Wing press was there, Left Wing press was there, there had been some cracks made in the media by Zelensky about him to begin with.
It wasn’t lost on Donald Trump that Zelensky made public appearances near Kamala Harris during the presidential election. Clearly, Zelensky had been pro-Democrat, although tried to be very careful about it. A lot of complaints. You get into the Oval Office, a lot of bad blood, a lot of people there, you get a blowup. Look at the pictures of him talking to Zelensky at the Pope’s funeral, one-on-one. Nobody knows what was said. No shouting there. No arguments. Four days later, they got a deal.
This is a good example. This is incumbent on people to look at the data. If you wanted to negotiate with this administration, probably not throwing rocks and meeting one-on-one and not airing your grievances publicly, that’s his strategy.
Exactly. He doesn’t like public rock-throwing contests and you are asking for trouble if you started.
The Duality Of Power: How Maximum Empathy Allows For Maximum Assertiveness
Someone’s reading this and like, “I want to be a better negotiator in my business, but these are not the tactics that I want to resort to, or I’m not comfortable with it.” Some of it’s got to be authentic. How do you encourage someone to be a little bit tougher, who’s maybe not without being coming off as artificially too tough or otherwise?
Bob Mnookin wrote a great book called Beyond Winning. This is when I was still with the FBI, Bob Mnookin was head of the program in negotiation at Harvard. The second chapter of Beyond Winning is a tension between empathy and assertiveness. I picked this book up and I look at that chapter and I’m thinking like, “There’s no tension. There’s no problem.” I read the book, and the title of the chapter is designed to make you read. It’s a sequencing issue. The More Empathic I Am, The More Assertive I Could Be.
A lot of these things, there are dualities like, it’s Kim Scott’s Radical Candor. Strong support and strong challenge at the same time.
Different way of saying the same thing. I’m going to be very empathic and I’m going to be immovable in my positions. I’m not going to call you names. I don’t think that helps. I think you being wounded over that are wounds that I prefer to not inflict. Simultaneously, I’ll be very empathic so I can be completely immovable.
It’s interesting. As you’re saying, you’ve got to understand the game that you’re playing. Here’s a business one that comes up a lot. As a company, we were always very transparent about our pricing to be direct, don’t play games or otherwise. We started dealing with large procurement departments, as a lot of people do. Procurement departments have a mandate. They have to get a pound of flesh. We learned if we just went in with our straight up thing, they would beat us. You had to pad the bill. If you didn’t play that game, you would end up getting hurt even if you didn’t want to play the game. I know a lot of people say that. What are your thoughts on that? I saw your reaction to it.
First of all, those guys are so vulnerable to empathy. What are the earmarks of the deal? Procurement on paper, one of the great business idea, one of the worst ideas possible in the history of corporations. Get a procurement guy out there. The procurement guy’s supposed to be an expert on everything from paperclips to drones because you’re buying everything.
Their KPIs, I think, are pay 10% less, irrespective of value. They have to come back and show that they got a pound of flesh.
My approach to everybody we’ve coached actually do really well with procurement.
The Procurement Department Challenge: Negotiation Strategy For Business Leaders
What’s the strategy? This for all the business leaders. They’re now sitting up on this. How would you deal with that if you’re someone who generally doesn’t play games with your pricing?
First of all, if they’re talking to you at all, you’re either the favorite or the fool. There’s human decision making. There’s Demand Gen writes psychology of buyer surveys. I study this stuff all the time. There’s basically a nine-step process to buying. In step three, they qualify you or disqualify you based on price. They don’t talk to you until step eight. Based on that, you’re the favorite or the fool.
The fool is the one being played against the favorite.
They’re going to kill you on price because they’re going to take it back to the favorite and go like, “IBM says they can do it for this price. You, Dell, have got to do it for this price.” What You don’t know if you’re Dell is they’re never going with IBM. IBM’s a fool. You are the favorite. If you’re the fool, there’s no point cutting your price because you’re not getting a business. If you’re the favorite, there’s no point cutting your price because you’re 90% of the way there.
If you’re the fool, there’s no point cutting your price because you’re not getting the business. If you’re the favorite, there’s no point cutting your price, because you’re 90% of the way there.
With that in mind, let them get their bonus on somebody else. Somebody else that they’re dealing with isn’t going to know that this is where they got to get their 10%. You deal with them with empathy, with enough or recognition of where they’re coming from. You politely, gently run out the clock because they got an internal deadline that they’re desperate to make because they got an internal client that’s standing there tapping their foot going, “Where are my paperclips?” Let them make their bonus on a guy who’s selling them the drones.
Wouldn’t you negotiate?
In negotiation, we could talk about terms other than price because you might suggest a term that’ll actually increase my profitability because there are black swans there. I know somebody from SpaceX. They don’t work for SpaceX anymore. SpaceX has pounded its suppliers. They either pound their suppliers or they buy them. You want to be the number one customer of your supplier. That way, you’re the number one customer.
This guy comes back to him and says, “I’m in a position to make this guarantee. You don’t want to cut your price now because you’re afraid this is going to be a one-off. You’re never going to get another deal with us. I will guarantee you as a customer for you for the next five years if you give me this much of a cut in price.” That’s a different conversation. “We got you for five years? I’ll do that deal.” What are the other terms that could make things more profitable?
Getting Over the Wall: The Secret To Long-Term Profit With Procurement
Sometimes it’s don’t disqualify yourself. I found you get these deals and then after procurement, they can double them, triple them, add more things. It doesn’t go back to procurement. Just get yourself over the wall, basically.
In a lot of cases, absolutely.
You were talking about questions before. I know another tactic you have is something called no-oriented questions. Can you describe what those are?
It’s so counterintuitive. Instead of driving for yes, you drive for no because people feel there’s a trap, a hook. “Where’s the trap if I say yes?” “Would you like to make more money?” “Really? What do you want?” “Would you like to have 2 million followers on Instagram?” “Okay. What do you want?” “Do you want to be on this cover of this magazine?” “What do you want?” We’re conditioned that every time somebody tries to get us to say yes, there’s a hook.
We’re conditioned that every time somebody tries to get us to say yes, there’s a hook.
Yeah, because there is, usually.
There is, but there’s enough of a time that people would get nervous and somebody’s like, “I won’t say yes to something I should say yes to because I’m afraid there’s a hook.” The opposite conditioning has taken place. Every time you say no, you feel like you’re safe. It’s stupid and true. Instead of saying, “Do you agree,” I say, “Do you disagree?” Instead of saying, “Do you have a few minutes to talk,” I say, “Is now a bad time to talk,” over and over. Twenty-three percent of the friction in my life has gone away instantaneously just making that change.
“Is now a bad time to talk?” You get them to say no, because saying yes feels weird.
It feels weird. Here’s the reaction you get. Here’s what you get every time. You say, “Is now a bad time to talk,” and they’ll hesitate. I go, “No. It’s never a bad time. What have you got?”
Right, because it’s not a good time, but it’s not a bad time.
Even more, you have their attention because they felt safe saying no.
Give me a few more examples of no questions. The one you said before was a double negative, so that confused me. What was the other example? You gave that example and another one.
I don’t do the double negatives. I’ll say, “Is this a stupid idea?” I got Jack Welch to agree to come to be a guest speaker at my course at USC before I introduced myself. He didn’t know my name. It was a book signing. No conversation at all. I said, “Is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at the negotiation course I teach at USC?” He stopped and his thinking face is the face that looks he’s considering killing you. A lot of people are like that. I call it the resting serial killer face. I have that.
I thought he was furious. I thought he was going to throw something at me. I thought he was going to have me thrown out. He had this hideous scowl on his face. Finally, he said, “This is my personal assistant’s name. This is a Twitter account we have set up to talk with her. I will call her and tell her who you are. I think we’re going to be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we are, we’ll come in and speak at your course,” based on me saying, “Is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at my course?”
I like that. I’m making a note on that.
We have, as it turns out, which would be happy to share through you to your audience, a list of the ten most common questions and have converted them to no-oriented questions. If you start practicing with these ten, then in a couple of days, you’ll find that you can switch them all over.
All right. If you share that, we’ll put that out in a newsletter to the Friday Forward audience. That would be great.
I’d be happy to.
Actionable Steps: What You Can Do This Week To Become A Better Negotiator
That’s a tactic I could use more of. I like that. “Is it a ridiculous idea for you to have me come speak at your event,” or something. It sounds offensive to say yes.
You don’t want to say yes anyway. Actually, when you say no, it clears your head. What you do is you consider the obstacles or either consider the obstacles or the implementation. In Jack’s case, he laid out the implementation. If there were obstacles, he might say, “No, it’s not ridiculous, but here are the following problems.” If you solve those problems, you’ve got the deal.
Is ridiculous the keyword you tend to use a lot?
I use, “Is it a ridiculous, is it a stupid idea? Do I sound an idiot?” I try to make it playful to some degree because it’s more approachable.
It’s a great trap. Even as a stupid idea, I’m going to dance around it. It just feels I don’t want to insult you, but that’s brilliant. I’m looking forward to sharing this. Last question. I’m going to modify this for you a little bit, but what’s a negotiating mistake that you made that you learned the most from?
Going with your ask too soon is a huge mistake. Going with it first or even too soon. Taking your time getting your ask is a real common mistake. If I let myself get triggered negatively by either your circumstances, your approach, anything that triggers negativity in my head is always going to make me dumber. A lot of that I’m becoming even more sensitive to these days is time of day. I’m looking at Daniel Pink’s book. It’s incredible.
Going with your ask too soon is a huge negotiating mistake.
I love that book. The example of the parolees and people got paroled. I was telling someone his example. They were telling me they were having surgery at 1:00 PM and I was like, “I don’t know. You’ve got to read When. You might not want to do that.”
That’s exactly it. That was his time-of-day thing.
He said, “Would you have surgery at this hospital? It has a 20% error rate.” You’re like, “God, no. What hospital is this?” It was the amalgamation of all the surgeries done at that time of day.
That was the same thing I was looking at. I said, “If you’re going to get a surgery, it better be 10:00 in the morning because the error rate is much lower at 10:00 AM.” Understanding the reality of timing is critical.
Chris, where can people learn more about you, your books, your organization? I know you do a lot of consulting and a whole bunch of stuff.
We got this great thing on our website. First of all, the website is BlackSwanLtd.com. The innovation that we just started in 2025, it’s The Black Swan Negotiation Community, which is free. You join the community and you start getting practice on people doing the same thing as you. It’s a community that helps each other grow.
It either turns you on to our high-value training or our coaching, which is expensive, or gives you the skills to build up enough of a financial support structure around you so that you can go to the high-level training. The Negotiation Community is something that is really helpful so you get assets and it’s free. At no cost, you can get started and then you can really find out what’s going on.
Chris, thanks for joining us. So many great tactics, it’s hard to keep track. I’m going to try to put the no one into practice because I launched my own book. I’m just going to say to everyone, “Is it a ridiculous idea if you have me come speak at your event?” Thank you very much.
My pleasure. Good luck with the book. Congratulations.
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