Benson Hongbin

Book 5/ 2026

Never split the difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz: 2016

"We just want what's fair..."
"Okay. I apologize. Let's stop everything and go back to where I started treating you unfairly, and we'll fix it."

Life is a series of negotiations, and essential negotiation skills are at the heart of collaboration - whether you are a business executive, a salesperson, a parent , a community leader, or a spouse. As a former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss gives you the tools for effective persuasion in any situation: negotiating a business deal, buying (or selling) a car, negotiating a salary, acquiring a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner, or communicating with your children. Taking the power of tactical empathy, open-ended questions, active listening, and intuition to the next level, this book gives you the competitive edge in any conflict resolution scenario.

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers, gang leaders, and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. By reinforcing that the key to a successful negotiation isn't being right, but having the right mindset, Voss takes you inside his world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the nine key principles that helped him and his colleagues succeed when it mattered the most – when people’s lives were at stake.

Rooted in the real-life experiences of an intelligence professional at the top of his game, this masterpiece will give you a competitive edge in any discussion.

Book 3/ 2026

Black Box Thinking: The surprising truth about success by Matthew Syed: 2015

"It is worth noting here, if only briefly, the link between blame and cognitive dissonance. In a culture where mistakes are considered blameworthy, they are also likely to be dissonant. When the external culture stigmatises mistakes, professionals are likely to internalize these attitudes. Blame and dissonance, in effect, are driven by the same misguided attitude to error. A failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress. A progressive attitude to failure turns out to be a cornerstone of success for any institution."

Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it’s safe to fail.
　
We all have to endure failure from time to time, whether it’s underperforming at a job interview, flunking an exam, or losing a pickup basketball game. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. Consider the shocking fact that preventable medical error is the third-biggest killer in the United States, causing more than 400,000 deaths every year. More people die from mistakes made by doctors and hospitals than from traffic accidents. Most of those mistakes are never made public because of malpractice settlements with nondisclosure clauses.

For a dramatically different approach to failure, look at aviation. Every passenger aircraft in the world is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to the onboard electronic systems, and another that records the conversations and sounds in the cockpit. Whenever there’s any sort of mishap, major or minor, the boxes are opened, the data is analyzed, and experts figure out exactly what went wrong. Then, the facts are published, and procedures are changed so that the same mistakes won’t happen again. By applying this method in recent decades, the industry has created an astonishingly good safety record.

Few of us put lives at risk in our daily work as surgeons and pilots do, but we all have a strong interest in avoiding predictable and preventable errors. So why don’t we all embrace the aviation approach to failure rather than the health-care approach? As Matthew Syed shows in this eye-opening book, the answer is rooted in human psychology and organizational culture.

Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgement of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Yet most of us are stuck in a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our careers and personal lives. We rarely acknowledge or learn from failure—even though we often claim the opposite. We think we have 20/20 hindsight, but our vision is usually fuzzy.

This book draws on a wide range of sources—from anthropology and psychology to history and complexity theory—to explore the subtle but predictable patterns of human error and our defensive responses to error. You will learn why it's advisable to embrace the guided-missile approach as opposed to the ballistic model of success: success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation. In addition, he shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement, such as David Beckham, the Mercedes F1 team, and Dropbox.

Sometimes, you need to change the direction. Patience is not always the optimal way.

Happy Trivia Tuesday, let's keep learning...
Did you know that...