147 Quotes by Chris Voss

A few years ago, I stumbled upon the book How to Become a Rainmaker,3 and I like to review it occasionally to refresh my sense of the emotional drivers that fuel decisions. The book does a great job to explain the.

The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue. This is one of the most basic tactics for avoiding emotional escalations. Our culture demonizes people in movies and politics, which creates the mentality that if we only got rid of the person then everything would be okay. But this dynamic is toxic to any negotiation.

Our techniques were the products of experiential learning; they were developed by agents in the field, negotiating through crisis and sharing stories of what succeeded and what failed. It was an iterative process, not an intellectual one, as we refined the tools we used day after day.

The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.

Your goal at the outset is to extract and observe as much information as possible. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators – they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover. Too.

He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.

To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that they have something concrete to lose if the deal falls through.

They were the economist Amos Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Together, the two launched the field of behavioral economics – and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize – by showing that man is a very irrational beast. Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking.

In practice, where our irrational perceptions are our reality, loss and gain are slippery notions, and it often doesn’t matter what leverage actually exists against you; what really matters is the leverage they think you have on them.