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

MISTAKE #3: THEY HAVE OTHER INTERESTS
Think back to William Griffin, the first man ever to kill a
hostage on deadline.
What the FBI and police negotiators on the scene simply
did not know was that his main interest was not negotiating
a deal to release the hostages for money. He wanted to be
killed by a cop. Had they been able to dig up that hidden
interest, they might have been able to avoid some of that
day’s tragedy.
The presence of hidden interests isn’t as rare as you
might think. Your counterpart will often reject offers for
reasons that have nothing to do with their merits.
A client may put off buying your product so that their
calendar year closes before the invoice hits, increasing his
chance for a promotion. Or an employee might quit in the

---

middle of a career-making project, just before bonus season,
because he or she has learned that colleagues are making
more money. For that employee, fairness is as much an
interest as money.
Whatever the specifics of the situation, these people are
not acting irrationally. They are simply complying with
needs and desires that you don’t yet understand, what the
world looks like to them based on their own set of rules.
Your job is to bring these Black Swans to light.
As we’ve seen, when you recognize that your counterpart is
not irrational, but simply ill-informed, constrained, or
obeying interests that you do not yet know, your field of
movement greatly expands. And that allows you to
negotiate much more effectively.
Here are a few ways to unearth these powerful Black
Swans:
GET FACE TIME
Black Swans are incredibly hard to uncover if you’re not
literally at the table.
No matter how much research you do, there’s just some
information that you are not going to find out unless you sit
face-to-face.
Today, a lot of younger people do almost everything
over email. It’s just how things are done. But it’s very
difficult to find Black Swans with email for the simple
reason that, even if you knock your counterpart off their
moorings with great labels and calibrated questions, email

---

gives them too much time to think and re-center themselves
to avoid revealing too much.
In addition, email doesn’t allow for tone-of-voice effects,
and it doesn’t let you read the nonverbal parts of your
counterpart’s response (remember 7-38-55).
Let’s return now to the tale of my client who was trying
to get Coca-Cola as a client, only to learn that his contact at
the company had been pushed aside.
I realized that the only way my client was going to get a
deal with Coca-Cola was by getting his contact to admit that
he was useless for the situation and pass my client on to the
correct executive. But there was no way this guy wanted to
do that, because he still imagined that he could be
important.
So I told my client to get his contact out of the Coca-
Cola complex. “You got to get him to dinner. You’re going
to say, ‘Would it be a bad idea for me to take you to your
favorite steak house and we just have a few laughs, and we
don’t talk business?’”
The idea was that no matter the reason—whether the
contact was embarrassed, or didn’t like my client, or just
didn’t want to discuss the situation—the only way the
process was going to move forward was through direct
human interaction.
So my client got this guy out for dinner and as promised
he didn’t bring up business. But there was no way not to
talk about it, and just because my client created personal,
face-to-face interaction, the contact admitted he was the

---

wrong guy. He admitted that his division was a mess and
he’d have to hand things off to somebody else to get the
deal done.
And he did. It took more than a year to get the deal
signed, but they did it.