Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator, and the author of Never Split the Difference, a book grounded in real-world negotiations where mistakes carried immediate and irreversible consequences. Unlike traditional business negotiation frameworks that emphasize compromise or persuasion, Voss’s approach is built around psychological realism—how people actually behave under pressure, with asymmetric power and incomplete information. That perspective maps uncomfortably well onto physician contract negotiations, where timelines are compressed, information is uneven, and risk is often transferred quietly rather than explicitly discussed. Voss’s framework is valuable here not because it promises dominance, but because it teaches physicians how to recognize leverage, uncover hidden costs, and avoid agreements that appear reasonable but create long-term exposure.