I didn’t find a single practical take away in the Voss book. The entire thing was him boasting about his “accomplishments”. I’d go as far as saying it was totally useless.
Completely disagree. I recall within the first few chapters using the line “How am I supposed to do that?” on a crazy exec I worked with, which had them reflect on their ridiculous ask of me. They thought about the task some more and dropped it… like magic. Very practical book.
The author's boasting is something I can imagine bothering some people! He definetly has a big mouth and the book beeing an american style writing doesn't help either. (especially at the end the book transforms to the longest advertisement in history for his own company).
But if you can look past that there were a lot of practical take away in the book, at least for me. The largest was how should I think about negotiation and how it is a part of life. My favourite technique I still use from day to day is 'labeling' and 'false labeling'. It just helps naturally start conversations when you meet someone at the office coffee machine.
Anyone who has mental blocks asking for a raise should definetly read it.
then you must have some learning disability because it was very well written. if i were to explain it to someone, i would say that the main idea was that you have two parties, two houses. you walk into the other party's house and simply let them explain their reasoning to you. you are indirectly confronting them. and by letting them do the talking, they have to back up everything they are saying, which leads to "gotcha" avoidance and makes the other side slowly chop off their demands that are not based on the truth until you get to the core of their wants or needs without all the fluff and glitter around it. if the other party would be as good in negotiating as you, they would then come into your house and let you do the talking, exposing your bs, not just theirs. but since that does not happen, you end up victorious, in a sense.
Agree with cpursley. Voss’ “this is a real thing I did and this is how it went!” stories overwhelmed my bullshit-o-meter so badly that I put the book down about 2/3 through. I think I got a paragraph’s worth of actionable information out of the most-of-the-book that I read.
As far as I could tell, the book was an ad for his consulting & training services. Which means that it did its job perfectly, between all the boasting and the nuggets of an idea that are almost, but not quite, useful (“man, this just isn’t working… guess I better pay for some classes!”)
What’s the point of a “nuh-uh!” comment like this?
The forest ain’t there. It’s a PR/advertising illusion that vanishes as soon as you engage critical thinking.
That’s my opinion. You disagree. Ok.
“How can I see the forest?” LOL.
[edit] for others reading this: it’s not that I didn’t find anything useful in the book, just that the useful bits were rare and most of the book is unrealistic BS about how effective the techniques are, which were either made up (the “true” truck-buying negotiation story, oh man, what a whopper) or omitted other factors to make the advice from the book seem to have saved the day all on its own. You’ll get the wrong idea if you take the book at face value, plus you’ll have wasted a lot of time reading a whole book that could have been a couple pretty-decent blog posts.
