I felt threatened.
I was at the top of my game because I had worked for the FBI for more than two decades, fifteen of which were spent negotiating hostage situations from New York to the Philippines and the Middle East. There are ten thousand FBI agents working in the Bureau at any given time, but there is only one lead international kidnapping negotiator. I was that.
However, I had never been in such a personal, tense hostage situation.
"We have your child, Loss. He will die unless we give him one million dollars.
Pause. Blink. Bring the heart rate back to normal with mindful effort.
Yes, I had been in situations like these before. Numerous of them. Life-sustaining cash. But not this way. Not when my son is calling. Not $1,000,000. And not against people who have expensive degrees and have mastered negotiation for a lifetime.
My counterparts at the table were negotiating professors from Harvard Law School, as you can see.
I would travel to Harvard to take a brief course on executive negotiating to see if there was anything I could learn from the business world's approach. For a guy who works for the FBI and wants to learn more about the world, it was supposed to be quiet and peaceful.
Yet, when Robert Nookie, the overseer of the Harvard
Exchange Exploration Venture, learned I was nearby, he
welcomed me to his office for an espresso. He stated, "Just to talk."
I felt honored. And anxious. I'd been following Nookie for years and he was an impressive individual: Not only does he teach law at Harvard, but he is also a major figure in the field of conflict resolution and the author of Bargaining with the Devil:
When to Arrange, When to Battle.
1 Being a former Kansas City beat cop, it felt unfair that Nookie wanted me to discuss negotiation with him. But it got worse after that. Soon after Nookie and I sat
down, the entryway opened and another Harvard teacher
strolled in. Gabriella Blum was a specialist in international negotiations, armed conflict, and counterterrorism who had worked as a negotiator for the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli National Security Council for eight years. The IDF's tough as nails force.
Nookie's secretary showed up right on time and set a tape recorder on the table. Blum and Nookie grinned at me.
I had been duped.
"Loss, we have your son. Nookie said, "Give us one million dollars or he dies." The kidnapper is me.
What are you going to do?"
That was to be expected, and I had a brief moment of panic. It remains constant: Even after negotiating for human lives for two decades, you still experience fear. even when engaged in role-playing.
I regained my composure. Yes, I was an FBI agent turned street cop competing against real heavyweights. Additionally, I lacked genius. But there was a reason I was in this room. I had developed abilities, strategies, and a holistic approach to human interaction over the course of my career, all of which had not only assisted me in saving lives but had also begun to transform my own life, as I now realize. Everything from how I dealt with customer service representatives to how I raised my children had been influenced by my years of negotiating.
“C’mon. Nookie said, "Get me the money or I'll chop your son's throat right now." Testy.
I gave him a long, deliberate look. I then grinned.
"How do I do that?" you may ask.
Nookie stopped. Like a dog when the cat it was chasing turns around and tries to chase it back, his expression had a touch of amused pity. It appeared as though we were engaging in distinct games with distinct rules.
As if to remind me that we were still playing, Nookie regained his composure and raised his eyebrows at me.
Mr. Loss, "So you're okay with me killing your son?"
Robert: "I'm sorry, but how do I know he's alive?" I said, apologizing and addressing him by his first name, adding more warmth to the conversation to complicate his plan to bully me. Sorry, but if I don't even know he's alive, how can I get you anything, much less a million dollars right now?
To see such a brilliant man overcome by what must have appeared to be ignorant foolishness was quite a sight. On the other hand, my action was anything but stupid. One of the FBI's most potent negotiating tools was being used by me: the inquiry without a right or wrong answer.
After developing these strategies for the private sector for some time in my consulting firm, The Black Swan Group, we now refer to them as calibrated questions: questions that can be answered by the other side but have no set answers. It gives you a break. It gives your adversary the impression of control—after all, they are the ones with the answers and power—but it does all of this without making them aware of how limited they are.
Nookie began to stumble, as was to be expected, as the conversation shifted from how I would respond to the threat of my son's murder to how the professor would handle the logistics of obtaining the money.
how he would deal with my issues. I kept asking how I was supposed to pay him and how I was supposed to know that my son was alive in response to every threat and demand he made.
Gabriella Blum came in after we had been doing that for three minutes.
She warned Nookie, "Don't let him do that to you."
He said, “Well, you try,” and raised his hands.
Blum entered. She was harder from her years in the
Center East. However, she continued to perform the bulldozer angle, and all she received were my identical inquiries.
Nookie returned to the meeting, but he also got nowhere.
His anger was beginning to show on his face. I could tell the
aggravation was making it hard to think.
"All right, Bob. That's all,” I told him, relieving him of his misery.
He nodded. My son would continue to live.
"Fine," he replied. I suppose we could learn something from the FBI.
I had done more than just stand up to two distinguished Harvard leaders. I had defeated the best of the best and prevailed.
But was it an accident? Harvard had been the world's center for negotiating theory and practice for more than three decades. The only thing I knew about the FBI's methods was that they worked. During my twenty years at the Bureau, we developed a system that was used to successfully resolve nearly every kidnapping. But we didn't have big ideas.
Experiential learning was the source of our methods; They were developed by field agents who negotiated through crises and shared success and failure stories. As we refined the tools we used day after day, it was an iterative process rather than an intellectual one. It was also urgent. Because someone would die if our tools didn't work, they had to.
But how did they function? That was the question that brought me to Harvard and Nookie and Blum's office. Outside of my confined world, I lacked confidence. Most importantly, I needed to explain my knowledge and figure out how to combine it with theirs, which they clearly had, so I could comprehend, organize, and broaden it.
Yes, our methods clearly worked against terrorists, mercenaries, drug dealers, brutal killers, and others. But what about normal people, I wondered?
In Harvard's storied halls, I would soon learn that our methods were universally effective and made perfect intellectual sense.
It turned out that the keys to unlocking profitable human interactions in every domain, interaction, and relationship in life lay in our negotiation strategy.
