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

—“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