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sequinstar 's review for:
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
by Tahl Raz, Chris Voss
The coverage of this book is a bit breathless, but for me it was hard to overlook the author’s high SES white guy privileges. In vignette after vignette he illustrates successful negotiation tactics he uses without ever mentioning the gender, racial power dynamics at play, so it’s hard to evaluate his ideas on the merits. It’s easy to imagine Voss using these techniques on his peers, as in his examples about salesmen and peers, or on those with lower status, such as the emotionally desperate or financially strapped kidnappers he mentions. None of his examples tho (that I recall) illustrates negotiating from a fundamentally one-down position, nor any reflection on how his opponents’ lower status influenced their decision to give in.
This is more than an oversight for female readers like me, and members of various other intersectional minorities. It’s easy to imagine other similar white guys parroting Voss’s words but… a college age girl? Anyone disabled? An elderly poc? Ignoring these dynamics renders his advice purely hypothetical, at least within the context of this book.
That being said, there was good food for thought. Shifting perspective to collaboration rather than competition, making progress by asking questions, and some of his other perspectives do feel like they could be universally applicable. While distracted by all the ways “that wouldn’t work for me”, my perspective did shift in some ways, and I look forward to digesting this book again to glean what’s of value for me, when I’m ready to ignore the erasure of what is not.
This is more than an oversight for female readers like me, and members of various other intersectional minorities. It’s easy to imagine other similar white guys parroting Voss’s words but… a college age girl? Anyone disabled? An elderly poc? Ignoring these dynamics renders his advice purely hypothetical, at least within the context of this book.
That being said, there was good food for thought. Shifting perspective to collaboration rather than competition, making progress by asking questions, and some of his other perspectives do feel like they could be universally applicable. While distracted by all the ways “that wouldn’t work for me”, my perspective did shift in some ways, and I look forward to digesting this book again to glean what’s of value for me, when I’m ready to ignore the erasure of what is not.