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

and secure the deal. He didn’t get rattled and he was good at
what he did.
Matter-of-fact. Street smart.
Dominick plowed ahead. And then, an amazing thing
happened—a nearly disastrous amazing thing. As Chris
Watts was talking to Dominick, he heard an electric tool of
some kind burrowing its way through the wall behind him.
It was one of our TARU guys, trying to get a bug planted
inside—in precisely the wrong spot, at precisely the wrong
time. Chris Watts was already rattled enough as it was, his
partner giving himself up like that and leaving him to play
out the siege on his own. And now, to hear our guys drilling
through the wall, it just about set him off.
He responded like a pit bull backed into a corner. He
called Dominick a liar. Dominick was unflappable. He kept
his cool as Chris Watts raged on the other end of the phone,
and eventually Dominick’s cool, calm demeanor brought
the guy from a boil to a simmer.
In retrospect, it was a fool move to try to get a bug inside
the bank at this late stage—born out of frustration and panic.
We’d gotten one of the hostage-takers out of the bank, but
now we’d given back a measure of control. Startling the one
remaining hostage-taker, who may or may not have been a
loose cannon, was absolutely not a good idea.
As Dominick went to work smoothing over the situation,
Chris Watts switched things up on us. He said, “What if I let
a hostage go?”
This came as if from nowhere. Dominick hadn’t even