Voss versus Fisher & Ury

I have long been a fan of Fisher and Ury's excellent book on Negotiating, Getting to Yes. This week, I've been reading Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference.

I started with a lot of enthusiasm. Voss's experience with, and anecdotes about, tense FBI hostage negotiations made this a sharp-edged read.  And much of his early material struck me as useful and thought-provoking, including the power of getting your opposite number to say no, for example; and his emphasis on the emotional dynamics of negotiating is clearly important.

Yet, by the time I ended, I was rather disenchanted and wrote a tetchy review on Goodreads. 

That was partly because he is keen to distinguish his approach form that of Fisher and Ury, but did so by misrepresenting their work significantly and repeatedly. He is clearly not stupid, and has been on the Harvard programme to learn the Getting to Yes approach, so I find that hard to excuse. 

And there's a limit to how many Chris Voss is brilliant anecdotes I can take.  The killer, for me, was when he recounted one of his student's successful negotiations, noted how he would have done better, but ends with a patronising, 'Still, well done.'

Moreover, he ends up essentially taking a hard - and manipulative - positional bargaining approach towards the end of the book, that is less compelling and less appealing than the earlier material.

Now the dust has settled, though, and I have calmed down a bit, I think the problem is the comparison. I think Fisher and Ury's approach is particularly important when you have an interest in a long-term relationship with your opposite number. That is not the case in the situations where Voss learned his craft, where your opposite number is likely to end up in jail for a very long time, if they actually survive the situation.

Voss now has a consulting business selling his approach to businesses, and the book is in part a sales brochure; and that worries me slightly, for the obvious reasons.

However, if you are in a high stakes negotiation, with a strong emotional component, and no need for an enduring relationship beyond the end of the negotiation, then Voss's approach looks good.

More appealing to me, however, is to retain the fundamental ethics and framework of principled negotiation, as laid out in Getting to Yes, and then enrich that with some of the many valuable insights and skills that Voss alludes to in the earlier parts of his book.

So a qualified recommendation of Voss's book; but I will keep Fisher and Ury as the go-to text for me and the one I will always recommend first.