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

THE SMARTEST DUMB GUY IN THE ROOM
To answer my questions, a year later, in 2006, I talked my
way into Harvard Law School’s Winter Negotiation Course.
The best and brightest compete to get into this class, and it
was filled with brilliant Harvard students getting law and
business degrees and hotshot students from other top Boston
universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and Tufts. The Olympic trials for negotiating. And I was the
only outsider.
The first day of the course, all 144 of us piled into a
lecture hall for an introduction and then we split into four
groups, each led by a negotiation instructor. After we’d had
a chat with our instructor—mine was named Sheila Heen,

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and she’s a good buddy to this day—we were partnered off
in pairs and sent into mock negotiations. Simple: one of us
was selling a product, the other was the buyer, and each had
clear limits on the price they could take.
My counterpart was a languid redhead named Andy (a
pseudonym), one of those guys who wear their intellectual
superiority like they wear their khakis: with relaxed
confidence. He and I went into an empty classroom
overlooking one of those English-style squares on Harvard’s
campus, and we each used the tools we had. Andy would
throw out an offer and give a rationally airtight explanation
for why it was a good one—an inescapable logic trap—and
I’d answer with some variation of “How am I supposed to
do that?”
We did this a bunch of times until we got to a final
figure. When we left, I was happy. I thought I’d done pretty
well for a dumb guy.
After we all regrouped in the classroom, Sheila went
around the students and asked what price each group had
agreed on, and then wrote the result on the board.
Finally, it was my turn.
“Chris, how did you do with Andy?” she asked. “How
much did you get?”
I’ll never forget Sheila’s expression when I told her what
Andy had agreed to pay. Her whole face first went red, as if
she couldn’t breathe, and then out popped a little strangled
gasp like a baby bird’s hungry cry. Finally, she started to
laugh.

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Andy squirmed.
“You got literally every dime he had,” she said, “and in
his brief he was supposed to hold a quarter of it back in
reserve for future work.”
Andy sank deep in his chair.
The next day the same thing happened with another partner.
I mean, I absolutely destroyed the guy’s budget.
It didn’t make sense. A lucky one-off was one thing. But
this was a pattern. With my old-school, experiential
knowledge, I was killing guys who knew every cutting-edge
trick you could find in a book.
The thing was, it was the cutting-edge techniques these
guys were using that felt dated and old. I felt like I was
Roger Federer and I had used a time machine to go back to
the 1920s to play in a tennis tournament of distinguished
gentlemen who wore white pantsuits and used wood rackets
and had part-time training regimens. There I was with my
titanium alloy racket and dedicated personal trainer and
computer-strategized serve-and-volley plays. The guys I
was playing were just as smart—actually, more so—and we
were basically playing the same game with the same rules.
But I had skills they didn’t.
“You’re getting famous for your special style, Chris,”
Sheila said, after I announced my second day’s results.
I smiled like the Cheshire cat. Winning was fun.
“Chris, why don’t you tell everybody your approach,”
Sheila said. “It seems like all you do to these Harvard Law
School students is say ‘No’ and stare at them, and they fall

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apart. Is it really that easy?”
I knew what she meant: While I wasn’t actually saying
“No,” the questions I kept asking sounded like it. They
seemed to insinuate that the other side was being dishonest
and unfair. And that was enough to make them falter and
negotiate with themselves. Answering my calibrated
questions demanded deep emotional strengths and tactical
psychological insights that the toolbox they’d been given
did not contain.
I shrugged.
“I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-
aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-
ended questions over and over and over and over. They get
worn out answering and give me everything I want.”
Andy jumped in his seat as if he’d been stung by a bee.
“Damn!” he said. “That’s what happened. I had no
idea.”
By the time I’d finished my winter course at Harvard, I’d
actually become friends with some of my fellow students.
Even with Andy.
If my time at Harvard showed me anything, it was that
we at the FBI had a lot to teach the world about negotiating.
In my short stay I realized that without a deep
understanding
of
human
psychology,
without
the
acceptance that we are all crazy, irrational, impulsive,
emotionally driven animals, all the raw intelligence and
mathematical logic in the world is little help in the fraught,
shifting interplay of two people negotiating.

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Yes, perhaps we are the only animal that haggles—a
monkey does not exchange a portion of his banana for
another’s nuts—but no matter how we dress up our
negotiations in mathematical theories, we are always an
animal, always acting and reacting first and foremost from
our deeply held but mostly invisible and inchoate fears,
needs, perceptions, and desires.
That’s not how these folks at Harvard learned it, though.
Their theories and techniques all had to do with intellectual
power, logic, authoritative acronyms like BATNA and
ZOPA, rational notions of value, and a moral concept of
what was fair and what was not.
And built on top of this false edifice of rationality was,
of course, process. They had a script to follow, a
predetermined sequence of actions, offers, and counteroffers
designed in a specific order to bring about a particular
outcome. It was as if they were dealing with a robot, that if
you did a, b, c, and d in a certain fixed order, you would get
x. But in the real world negotiation is far too unpredictable
and complex for that. You may have to do a then d, and
then maybe q.
If I could dominate the country’s brightest students with
just one of the many emotionally attuned negotiating
techniques I had developed and used against terrorists and
kidnappers, why not apply them to business? What was the
difference between bank robbers who took hostages and
CEOs who used hardball tactics to drive down the price of a
billion-dollar acquisition?

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After all, kidnappers are just businessmen trying to get
the best price.