Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

part of it, the commander looked like he didn’t have a
handle on the situation.
But like I said, we didn’t know about the commander’s
reaction just yet. All we knew was that we’d just gotten all
this new intel, which told us we were closer to achieving our
desired outcome than we had just thought. This was a
positive development, something to celebrate. With what we
now knew, it was going to be a whole lot easier to negotiate
our way through the rest of it, and yet this commander was
angry. He didn’t like that he’d been played, so he turned to
one of the guys from NYPD’s Technical Assistance
Response Unit (TARU) and commanded them to get a
camera inside the bank, a mic . . . something.
Now that I was huddled with Bobby, the commander
swapped me out in favor of another primary negotiator on
the phone. The new negotiator played it the same way I had,
a couple of hours earlier—said, “This is Dominick. You’re
talking to me now.”
Dominick Misino was a great hostage negotiator—in my
view, one of the world’s great closers, which was the term
often used for the guy brought in to bang out the last details

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and secure the deal. He didn’t get rattled and he was good at
what he did.
Matter-of-fact. Street smart.
Dominick plowed ahead. And then, an amazing thing
happened—a nearly disastrous amazing thing. As Chris
Watts was talking to Dominick, he heard an electric tool of
some kind burrowing its way through the wall behind him.
It was one of our TARU guys, trying to get a bug planted
inside—in precisely the wrong spot, at precisely the wrong
time. Chris Watts was already rattled enough as it was, his
partner giving himself up like that and leaving him to play
out the siege on his own. And now, to hear our guys drilling
through the wall, it just about set him off.
He responded like a pit bull backed into a corner. He
called Dominick a liar. Dominick was unflappable. He kept
his cool as Chris Watts raged on the other end of the phone,
and eventually Dominick’s cool, calm demeanor brought
the guy from a boil to a simmer.
In retrospect, it was a fool move to try to get a bug inside
the bank at this late stage—born out of frustration and panic.
We’d gotten one of the hostage-takers out of the bank, but
now we’d given back a measure of control. Startling the one
remaining hostage-taker, who may or may not have been a
loose cannon, was absolutely not a good idea.
As Dominick went to work smoothing over the situation,
Chris Watts switched things up on us. He said, “What if I let
a hostage go?”
This came as if from nowhere. Dominick hadn’t even

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thought to ask, but Chris Watts just offered up one of the
tellers like it was no big deal—and to him, at this late stage
in the standoff, I guess it wasn’t. From his view, such a
conciliatory move might buy him enough time to figure out
a way to escape.
Dominick remained calm, but seized on the opportunity.
He said he wanted to talk to the hostage first, to make sure
everything went okay, so Chris Watts tapped one of the
women and put her on the phone. The woman had been
paying attention, knew there’d been some sort of snafu
when Bobby wanted to give himself up, so even though she
was still completely terrified she had the presence of mind to
ask about the door. I remember thinking this showed a lot of
brass—to be terrified, held against your will, roughed up a
bit, and to still have your wits about you.
She said, “Are you sure you have a key to the front
door?”
Dominick said, “The front door’s open.”
And it was.
Ultimately, what happened was one of the women came
out, unharmed, and an hour or so later the other woman
followed, also unharmed.
We were working on getting the bank guard out, but we
couldn’t be sure from the accounts of these bank tellers
what kind of shape this guy might be in. We didn’t even
know if he was still alive. They hadn’t seen him since first
thing that morning. He could have had a heart attack and
died—there was just no way to know.

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But Chris Watts had one last trick up his sleeve. He
pulled a fast one on us and out of the blue, offered to come
out. Maybe he thought he could catch us off guard one last
time. What was strange about his sudden appearance was
that he seemed to be looking about, surveying the scene,
like he still thought he’d somehow elude capture. Right up
until the moment the cops put the handcuffs on him, his
gaze was darting back and forth, scanning for some kind of
opportunity. The bright lights were on this guy, he was
basically surrounded, but somewhere in the back of his
scheming, racing mind he still thought he had a chance.
It was a long, long day, but it went down in the books as
a success. Nobody was hurt. The bad guys were in custody.
And I emerged from the experience humbled by how much
more there was to learn, but at the same time, awakened to
and inspired by the elemental power of emotion, dialogue,
and the FBI’s evolving toolbox of applied psychological
tactics to influence and persuade just about anyone in any
situation.
In the decades since my initiation into the world of high-
stakes negotiations, I’ve been struck again and again by
how valuable these seemingly simple approaches can be.
The ability to get inside the head—and eventually under the
skin—of your counterpart depends on these techniques and
a willingness to change your approach, based on new
evidence, along the way. As I’ve worked with executives
and students to develop these skills, I always try to reinforce
the message that being right isn’t the key to a successful

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negotiation—having the right mindset is.