Chris Voss

Christopher Voss was born in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, in 1957. He earned a B.S. from Iowa State University and a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School — but his real education came over a 24-year career in the FBI.

Voss rose to become the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator and its hostage-negotiation representative for the National Security Council's Hostage Working Group. He served as lead crisis negotiator for the FBI's New York City Division, spent years on the NYC Joint Terrorism Task Force, and worked cases from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 2006 kidnappings of journalists Jill Carroll in Iraq and Steve Centanni in Gaza. Across his career he worked more than 150 international hostage cases and was trained by the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Harvard Law School. He holds the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association's award for distinguished service.

After retiring from the Bureau in 2007, Voss founded The Black Swan Group, a negotiation-training firm and consultancy, and set out to translate life-and-death negotiation into tools for business and everyday life. In 2016 he published — with journalist Tahl Raz — _Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It_, a Wall Street Journal bestseller that has since sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and is routinely named among the best books ever written on negotiation. He followed it with _The Full Fee Agent_ (2022) and teaches a widely praised MasterClass on the art of negotiation.

Today Voss is an adjunct professor and lecturer at Harvard Law School, Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, and the USC Marshall School of Business, and — through The Black Swan Group's training, live events, and community — one of the most sought-after voices in the world on how people can negotiate and communicate better.