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

boy he was taking to Michigan for eye surgery; prominent
Haitian politicians and businessmen bundled from their
homes in broad daylight. No one was spared.
Most of the abductions went down the same way: ski-
mask-clad kidnappers surrounded a house or a car, forced
entry with a gun, and snatched a vulnerable victim—usually
a woman, child, or elderly person.
Early on, there was the possibility that the kidnappings
were driven by politically aligned gangs seeking to
destabilize Haiti’s new government. This proved to be
wrong. Haitian criminals are famous for employing brutal
means for political ends, but when it came to kidnappings, it
was almost always all business.
Later on, I’ll get to how we pieced together the clues to
discover who the perpetrators were and what they really
wanted—invaluable information when it came to negotiating
with and destabilizing these gangs. But first I want to
discuss the crystallizing feature of high-stakes, life-and-
death negotiating: that is, how little of it is on the surface.
When that Monday ransom call came in to the
politician’s nephew, the guy was so petrified he could only
think of doing one thing: paying the thugs. His reaction
makes sense: when you get a call from brutal criminals who
say they’ll kill your aunt unless you pay them immediately,
it seems impossible to find leverage in the situation. So you
pay the ransom and they release your relative, right?
Wrong. There’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a
linear formula: add X to Y to get Z. We all have irrational