The FBI's hostage negotiation playbook applied to every high-stakes conversation you have — client renewals, salary talks, tough vendors, difficult teammates.
Chris Voss spent 24 years as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator. His claim that emotion drives every decision, and that rational negotiation models miss this, broke ranks with Harvard's \Getting to Yes\ tradition. Since his book \Never Split the Difference\ came out in 2016, it's sold millions of copies and his MasterClass is consistently among the platform's top-ranked business courses.
This course teaches the methodology honestly: what the techniques are, how they actually work on a neurochemical level, and where they backfire. You'll learn to label an emotion, mirror a counterpart's own words, trigger the "that's right" bonding epiphany, run an accusation audit before a hard conversation, ask calibrated questions that let the other side solve your problem, adapt your approach to the three negotiator types, find the Black Swans that reshape a deal, and use the Ackerman bargaining sequence when the numbers hit the table.
Each lesson has verbatim techniques, worked examples from Voss's cases (Philippines kidnapping, Jack Welch speaking ask, the Christmas tree argument), and the failure modes most summaries skip, including Voss's own early missteps that taught him when the framework doesn't work.
