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

Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s ...

I knew I needed to call and assuage him to straighten out the situation, or I risked being expelled. Top ...

problems go away. That approach has never failed me. Let’s go back to the cranky grandfather. He’s grump ...

TJ, who worked as an assistant controller at the Washington Redskins, put that lesson to work while he was t ...

TJ left messages; no one called back. A few weeks into the class, TJ rewrote the script. These weren’t massive ...

DESTINATION Remember the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear in reaction to threats? We ...

fund-raiser for the Girl Scouts, who backed into naming her counterpart’s fears almost accidentally. We’re not ...

donor’s criteria, all she got was still rejection. Sensing the potential donor’s growing frustration, and ...

miraculously solve everything else. DO AN ACCUSATION AUDIT On the first day of negotiating class each semester ...

less forbidding. All of us have intuitively done something close to this thousands of times. You’ll s ...

As an example, I’m going to use the experience of one of my students, Anna, because I couldn’t be more ...

would have damaged Anna’s firm’s reputation with a very important customer, and could have led to ...

feel this work was promised to you from the beginning,” Mark said. They trained in front ...

“It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime contractor trying to push out the small b ...

“This is not a good situation but we appreciate the fact that you are acknowledging what happened, and we ...

another, rising, riffing, falling, and pausing in perfect harmony. Here is the situation (the so ...

making every effort not to scream back. After she’d said, “There’s nothing I can do,” five ...

“Booked solid?” Now let’s pause. Up to this point, Ryan has been using labels and mirrors to build a ...

possible deal, engages in some silence. After thirty seconds, Wendy prints a boarding pass and ha ...

marks our most critical conversations in life. They will help you connect and create more meanin ...