I thought that Voss's work as an FBI negotiator negated a lot of his advice. With the FBI, the building is surrounded, and the criminal is forced to negotiate with him. There are no alternatives, and there's a threat of violent action being taken against the criminal if the negotiations are refused or dont go the way Voss wants.

In business, the person on the other side has alternatives and they can walk away at any time. They don't even have to talk to you. You can be rejected because of the most minor thing or nothing at all. People say "no" all the time, and you can't send your coworkers into the building to murder them for it.

Voss just ignores the violent threat the criminal faces, and pretends the criminal is talking to him freely. But everyone in his negotiations knows every word he says is backed up with the threat of violence.

I dropped it about 2/3 through because too much of it was reading as plainly-bullshit. "I got a great deal on my truck by just saying 'how can I do that?' over and over! Here's how it went!" LOL, no you didn't, and no it didn't, and now I'm wondering whether literally any of your other stories were even a little true.

I got a very little bit out of it, but the useful bit could have been a blog post. The rest was egotistical crap that seemed to mainly be content-marketing for his business.

It's been a while and I cant remember if that was a hypothetical applying his approach to a non-criminal negotiation, or if he was saying it was a real incident... but I remember reading it, and thinking: the only way that works is if the FBI is waiting to arrest you if you refuse. If he was saying those examples were real, I agree it sounds like bullshit. I don't think his approach works in non-criminal negotiations.

how do you compare this to "Getting to Yes Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In"

I'll throw in some thoughts about Never split the difference -- there's a lot of useful perspective in that book, and I appreciated it. However, speaking 'technical founderese', the book is solely about a kind of negotiation that almost never occurs in business life: a single iteration game theoretic game.

In real life, especially when you're younger than 60 and in business, every negotiation is part of an iterated game -- you are, much more than negotiating any single deal / job offer / contract term, figuring out who you want to work with, making friends and allies and partners along the way.

In those terms, most of that book is toxic, or at least sociopathic. That's fine if your only job is to get terrorists to put away their guns. But, it's definitely less fine if you are cutting a deal with someone who you will definitely intersect with multiple times in your life. And that's most people, it turns out. :)

Anyway, I think the book is super interesting, but I think technical types or those with a bit of ASD may find the relational approach hurts them more than winning any particular negotiation.