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

ACKERMAN BARGAINING
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the psychological judo

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that I’ve made my stock in trade: the calibrated questions,
the mirrors, the tools for knocking my counterpart off his
game and getting him to bid against himself.
But negotiation still comes down to determining who
gets which slice of the pie, and from time to time you’re
going to be forced into some real bare-knuckle bargaining
with a hard-ass haggler.
I faced bare-knuckle bargaining all the time in the
hostage world. I haggled with a lot of guys who stuck to
their game plan and were used to getting their way. “Pay or
we’ll kill,” they’d say, and they meant it. You had to have
your skills drum-tight to negotiate them down. You need
tools.
Back at FBI negotiation training, I learned the haggling
system that I use to this day. And I swear by it.
I call the system the Ackerman model because it came
from this guy Mike Ackerman, an ex-CIA type who
founded a kidnap-for-ransom consulting company based out
of Miami. On many kidnappings we’d constantly be paired
with “Ackerman guys”—never Mike himself—who helped
design the haggle.
After I retired from the FBI, I finally met Mike on a trip
to Miami. When I told him I also used the system for
business negotiations, he laughed and said he’d run the
system by Howard Raiffa, a legendary Harvard negotiation
guy, and Howard had said it would work in any situation.
So I felt pretty justified by that.
The Ackerman model is an offer-counteroffer method, at

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least on the surface. But it is a very effective system for
beating the usual lackluster bargaining dynamic, which has
the predictable result of meeting in the middle.
The systematized and easy-to-remember process has
only four steps: