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

DON’T COMPROMISE
Let’s go back to the $150,000 ransom demand. We’re
always taught to look for the win-win solution, to
accommodate, to be reasonable. So what’s the win-win
here? What’s the compromise? The traditional negotiating
logic that’s drilled into us from an early age, the kind that
exalts compromises, says, “Let’s just split the difference and
offer them $75,000. Then everyone’s happy.”
No. Just, simply, no. The win-win mindset pushed by so
many negotiation experts is usually ineffective and often
disastrous. At best, it satisfies neither side. And if you
employ it with a counterpart who has a win-lose approach,
you’re setting yourself up to be swindled.
Of course, as we’ve noted previously, you need to keep
the cooperative, rapport-building, empathetic approach, the
kind that creates a dynamic in which deals can be made. But
you have to get rid of that naïveté. Because compromise

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—“splitting the difference”—can lead to terrible outcomes.
Compromise is often a “bad deal” and a key theme we’ll hit
in this chapter is that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”
Even in a kidnapping?
Yes. A bad deal in a kidnapping is where someone pays
and no one comes out.
To make my point on compromise, let me paint you an
example: A woman wants her husband to wear black shoes
with his suit. But her husband doesn’t want to; he prefers
brown shoes. So what do they do? They compromise, they
meet halfway. And, you guessed it, he wears one black and
one brown shoe. Is this the best outcome? No! In fact, that’s
t h e worst possible outcome. Either of the two other
outcomes—black or brown—would be better than the
compromise.
Next time you want to compromise, remind yourself of
those mismatched shoes.
So why are we so infatuated with the notion of
compromise if it often leads to poor results?
The real problem with compromise is that it has come to
be known as this great concept, in relationships and politics
and everything else. Compromise, we are told quite simply,
is a sacred moral good.
Think back to the ransom demand: Fair is no ransom,
and what the nephew wants is to pay nothing. So why is he
going to offer $75,000, much less $150,000, for the
ransom? There is no validity in the $150,000 request. With
any compromise, the nephew ends up with a bizarrely bad

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result.
I’m here to call bullshit on compromise right now. We
don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise
because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise
in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its
essence, we compromise to be safe. Most people in a
negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain.
Too few are driven by their actual goals.
So don’t settle and—here’s a simple rule—never split the
difference. Creative solutions are almost always preceded by
some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict.
Accommodation and compromise produce none of that.
You’ve got to embrace the hard stuff. That’s where the great
deals are. And that’s what great negotiators do.