Never Split the Difference

Never Split the Difference is a practical book on negotiation told by a man that has experience in high-stake negotiations where lives hang in the balance. It's a little odd to take that one-line summary at first glance and come away convinced that this will help you in negotiating mundane things that are a part of your every day life, like rent or a paycheck.

The book is interesting in that it doesn't focus on game theory or intellectual arguments much at all. The keystone of the methods put forward by Voss is actually emotional intelligence (Voss coins the phrase "tactical empathy", which is actually kind of hilarious). He thinks that what his experience has taught him most is that a lot of kidnappers, bank robbers, and other would-be action movie characters don't barter using strong logic, not exclusively anyway, and neither does the average person on the street.

He encourages empathizing with the people you're negotiating with, to call them generous and to keep your "late night FM DJ" voice on at all times. Ask open-ended questions and make them solve your problems ("How am I supposed to pay $X for this when this less expensive alternative is right in front of me?", "How am I supposed to do that?") while being as earnest, calm, and reasonable as you can manage to be - you and your counterpart are working together toward a solution. It's a pretty moral system if you approach it with the right mindset, or a pretty amoral one if you're a sociopath (sort of like "How to Win Friends and Influence People").