Cross-posted from Goodreads
Practical, on-the-ground tips from a long-time FBI hostage negotiator. While some tips from hostage crises may not translate 1:1 to business or personal negotiations, most of them do (you’ll instinctively feel so).
The author does an excellent job in pushing across two major takeaways — (a) you cannot separate out emotion from negotiation (rationality is intrinsically based on emotions or worldviews) and (b) do not run/shy away from difficult conversations even when you feel uncomfortable (conflict, however small or big, is part of human interactions and not such a bad thing – it requires collaboration to resolve it).
Tips shared in the book certainly feel more modern than the techniques presented in You Can Negotiate Anything: The World’s Best Negotiator Tells You How To Get What You Want (Voss even explicitly points that out somewhere in the middle of the book). Still, a lot of stuff in Cohen’s book feels still relevant, at least from a confidence-boosting perspective. I’d take good parts from both the books to test my newly learned skills in the real world.