Book Review
2/5 stars
Questionable practical applicability
*******

I like this book, but for some reason it is extremely difficult for me to organize my thoughts on the topic--and that is for both philosophical and practical reasons. 

Described below. 

∆∆∆Practical: 

The cases that Voss describes are just too limited / unusual in nature to be of much assistance to Everyman. 

For us working squares, how often do we have a chance to actually apply these principles? 

The situations that the author describes are ones where he is in a position of great strength. 

For example, walking into a car dealer to pay cash for a car that he wanted. (Meanwhile, the rest of us only purchase a new car when the old one goes out and we most likely finance it.) 

In the very last chapter, Voss talked about coaching someone through a deal for a $3.6 million property that he was acquiring. (We purchased a house just a few years back --using a mortgage, and not cash-- and there were 20 bidders for every single house and we just happened to get lucky because of a good rapport with the selling agent.) 

And what possible way could we have approached our situation from a position of strength? 

Much of the same story is the case with people who work and get paid by the hour: it is NEVER the case of one single applicant "negotiating" a good wage. 

It's more like: X number of dollars per hour is allocated for this position, take it or leave it. 

(This author was a hostage negotiator - - something very very few of us will have the chance to be.) 

Another Big Question is: how limited is the applicability of his negotiation style and observations in the case where the stakes are low enough to create a vicious conflict? (I think this has been very precisely/aptly formulated as Sayre's law.) 

Every single one of these cases that Voss mentions are about things where the actors have something significant at stake. But, rabbinic / academic politics are extremely vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. 

∆∆∆Philosophical: 

What about the ethics of making use of all of these tactics. ("That which is hateful to you do not do unto others.") 

I am emphatically DO NOT appreciate it when people try to "slick talk" me or "read" me. (I do not use any "urban dialect," and yet it happens all the time that "certain people" think that they can create an instant bond by throwing in a  "bro" / "bra"/"yo.") 

I have been in the situation countless times while teaching abroad where some prospective employer did not want to hire black people (like the present writer), or they did not want to accept me as a religious conversion (Geirut) candidate, or, they were not keen to have me participate in all parts of a synagogue service (Torah reader, shliach tzibbur, etc). 

And so, my requests were met with non-committal answers or stalling for time (tactics that are encouraged in this book), when ultimately the answer was "no." 

If they had just said to me at that time "Sorry, bub, but we just don't want black people for [insert pertinent situation]," they could have saved both of our time and I would not have been the least bit offended. 

There is nothing more aggravating than dealing with somebody who cannot tell you a direct YES or NO.
******* 

Of the book: 

It is a very interesting and easy to read book that is essentially about the alchemy of negotiation. 

247 pages of prose over 10 chapters, for 24.7 pages per chapter. (Lots of white space and fast reading.) 

Voss is extremely sparse with his references:  I count 23 books that he refers to over the entirety of his book, and there is almost no pointing back to specific chapters/pages within his sources. (23 books is not that great of a number; I just finished reading a book about kashrut that was just as long as this one that had 369 different references) 

Nor do I see any peer-reviewed articles.  (The author did establish that academics don't really live anywhere on this planet with respect to negotiating skills, so that might not be that big of a handicap.) 

And, in spite of the sparseness of the citations....Voss does seem to draw on a lot of research that has stood the test of time: 

1. Daniel Kahneman's System 1/System2 and Prospect Theory. 

2. Anchoring (in negotiation) 

3. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. (A lot of people will refuse a $99 to $1 split of some money, even though they would be at least $1 better off by accepting the bargain and no better off by refusing a bargain that they felt impugned their honor.) 

********
The author makes us want to believe that being able to read/understand people is something that can be learned. 

But, I just really wonder: We all know men who are able to successfully bed dozens of women because they have a preternatural ability to read a woman's thoughts just by noticing subtleties. (If you ask them to sit down and write five pages explaining how they do what they do, they probably could not.) 

And if it was the case that that *was* a learnable skill, wouldn't ALL men be lining up to learn it so that they could tuck into more sets of moist and available loins? 

Meanwhile, this skill also doesn't seem to depend on native intelligence: I have met people that are Talmudic scholars that have the personality of a cattle prod (or wet sand), and even after several decades of studying they did not learn to develop the same. 

So, since these skills don't depend on raw intellect, is it something more....... Intangible? 

*******
Voss also mentions in the first chapter (which, by the way, feels a bit self-aggrandizing) that academics have one notion of human interaction and people who are practitioners - - such as FBI negotiators, like the author--have a completely different perception of reality. 

But to be quite honest, you can pick ANY topic of ANY type and you will find that academics are the last ones to be aware Some Particular Phenomenon exists in reality (because they think that it does not) or that Another Particular Phenomenon does not exist in reality (because they think it does). 

There has to be a reason that Marxists only exist in American universities and people who are capable of building business empires don't stay in academia.

But, if we take him at his word as an expert.... How do we really know that he knows what he is talking about? (Anthony Fauci has been an idiot for several decades--and even as far back as the beginning of the discovery of HIV/AIDS, even though he purports to be an expert.) 

******* 

How profound is a lot of this material really? 

For people who sell certified pre-owned cars, their modus operandi is to get you to pay as much as they can get out of you for a car. 

And the skills that they need in order to do that are specific, but finite. (It appears to me that most car dealerships have an extremely high turnover rate, and selling cars is not something that you have to be broken out with brilliance to do.) 

If there is something that you do everyday (and part of it is dealing with some class of people), is it a specific and limited skill in its own right that you learn as needed for everyday use,  or is it something that you can abstract/improve based on what you learn in this book? 

I'm just not certain. 

Verdict: Cautious recommendation.