Chris Voss, Former FBI Hostage Negotiator, Author
Today, my guest is Chris Voss, Founder & CEO of The Black Swan Group, Former FBI Hostage Negotiator, and Best-Selling Author of Never Split the Difference. Chris used his many years of experience in international crises and high-stakes negotiations to develop a unique negotiation training program (The Black Swan Method®) which has since grown into a holistic set of tactics and approaches that apply globally-proven negotiation techniques to the world of business.
Prior to 2008, Chris was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. During Chris’s 24-year tenure with the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI, but also Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School.
Chris is also a recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service. Chris has taught business negotiation in MBA programs as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. He also taught business negotiation at Harvard University and guest lectured at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Goethe Business School in Frankfurt, Germany.
In this candid conversation, Chris shared the real stories behind his transition from the FBI to the boardroom, the hidden magic of empathy, and how he turned elite law students inside out.
1. A Knee Injury Leads to the Phones. Chris revealed that his journey to becoming a hostage negotiator wasn’t initially part of a master plan. After joining the FBI and making a SWAT team, he suffered two major knee injuries that required reconstructive surgery. Realizing he couldn’t keep landing in the mud with SWAT, he noticed the hostage negotiators were safely stationed somewhere else talking on the phones. This realization prompted him to volunteer at a suicide hotline to gain the operational experience needed to qualify for the role.
2. The Magic of Operational Empathy. Working on the suicide hotline gave Chris his first real exposure to “operational emotional intelligence”. He quickly realized that specific negotiation skills—such as employing genuine empathy and a highly calibrated tone of voice—acted almost like a “magic wand”. This invisible skill set allowed him to safely de-escalate tense situations and gain massive behavioral influence over people without them even realizing what was happening.
3. Tying Harvard in Knots. Chris soon suspected that his life-or-death communication skills could be highly effective in business. Toward the end of his FBI career, he attended a negotiation course at Harvard Law School, where he used his hostage tactics to completely turn the elite students “inside out” and tie them in knots. The Harvard instructors ultimately confirmed that the core emotional dynamics of negotiation are exactly the same, regardless of whether the stakes are a corporate contract or a human life.
4. Writing a Usable Playbook. When creating his bestselling book, Never Split the Difference, Chris aggressively wanted to avoid writing another dry, academic business encyclopedia. To ensure the concepts actually worked for civilians, he forced his Georgetown MBA students to “road test” his FBI skills in their real lives rather than relying on pretend classroom exercises. After firing four different writers, he eventually partnered with a genius business author to help successfully translate his deep knowledge of human decision-making into a highly accessible playbook.
