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

another, rising, riffing, falling, and pausing in perfect
harmony.
Here is the situation (the song, if you will): My student
Ryan B. was flying from Baltimore to Austin to sign a large
computer-consulting contract. For six months, the client
representative had gone back and forth on whether he
wanted the services, but a major system collapse put the
representative in a tight spot with his CEO. To shift the
blame, he called Ryan with his CEO on the line and very
aggressively demanded to know why it was taking Ryan so
long to come ink the contract. If Ryan was not there by
Friday morning, he said, the deal was off.
Ryan bought a ticket for the next morning, Thursday,
but a freak lightning storm whipped up in Baltimore, closing
the airport for five hours. It became painfully clear that
Ryan wasn’t going to make his original connection to
Austin from Dallas. Worse, when he called American
Airlines just before departing, he found that his connection
had been automatically rebooked to 3 p.m. the next day,
putting the contract in jeopardy.
When Ryan finally got to Dallas at 8 p.m., he ran to the
gate where the day’s final American Airlines flight to Austin
was less than thirty minutes from takeoff. His goal was to
get on that flight or, at worst, get an earlier flight the next
day.
In front of him at the gate, a very aggressive couple was
yelling at the gate agent, who was barely looking at them as
she tapped on the computer in front of her; she was clearly