Some references are worth every minute of your time and more. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (3rd ed., 2011) by law professor Roger Fisher, anthropologist William Ury, and negotiation consultant Bruce Patton is a bookend reference in that category. This book provides a route to avoid the dead ends of winning everything or, worse, giving up.
Getting to Yes advocates deciding “issues on their merits rather than through a haggling process focused on what each side says it will and won’t do.” The book is best known for advising to separate people from problems, interests from positions, and establishing a negotiation’s Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). These ideas are among the basic practices of any proficient negotiator.
Successful Cooperation Over Divisive Competition
Fisher, Ury, and Patton concentrate on negotiation as a cooperative endeavor to get something done. The authors’ central lesson: recognize that negotiation is about something, not someone.
They note our unconscious tendency to focus on someone’s behaviors and position, despite those actions only representing one possible solution to an underlying interest (or problem). “When negotiators bargain over positions, they tend to lock themselves into those positions.” A successful negotiation focusses on recognizing that interests are more important than positions, and negotiation is about creating something new, not taking all you see.
Getting to Yes also shifts the negotiator’s focus onto a BATNA, the alternative to the negotiation’s productive completion. A BATNA defines the situation if the negotiations fail or, alternatively, were never even pursued in the first place. What would a party do, what would it cost, and what would be the long-term impact? A BATNA structures a negotiator’s own interests.
Easy Read For Important Basics
Fisher, Ury, and Patton succinctly outline the problem with adversarial negotiations and quickly move on to describe their idea of principled negotiation, a contrast to ‘hard’ winning or ‘soft’ losing. They provide a wide variety of negotiation examples, from small and personal to large and in the news. The book’s helpful Q&A was borne out of extensive teaching in the Harvard Negotiation Project (Harvard Program on Negotiation).
Their concepts are on target but, as a negotiator learns and practices, would benefit from a more integrated approach. Early on in a negotiator’s skill development, their procedural approach is invaluable. Later, however, nuances arise that don’t quite fit the pattern outlined. Despite years of engaging in negotiations, Getting to Yes still provides me useful reinforcement in the fundamentals.
Police Looking For Underlying Interests
Interest and alternatives play out wherever you go. A few years ago, my wife and I vacationed in Berlin. Running low on cash and eager to get to our next sightseeing destination, we sought out an ATM. While she waited in the shade of the Brandenburg Gate, I made a beeline to a possible location around the corner. Walking briskly and purposefully, I trotted no more than a few meters before hearing my wife, uncharacteristically, yell my name.
Spinning around to see her emphatically pointing behind me, I continued my spin to see two armed police officers walking as briskly and purposefully forward; eyes fixed on mine. Outside my consciousness until that moment—the US Embassy entrance was only a few meters away. My position of walking forcefully toward the Embassy quickly became an apparent interest of theirs. A short, prototypical conversation in German illuminated my interest in an ATM—as I rapidly calculated my BATNA: handcuffs or worse.
By this time, I had read Getting to Yes multiple times and practiced the ideas in innumerable situations. This negotiation resolved successfully to everyone’s satisfaction, we resumed our day with a new story to tell the kids.
A Must-read, and Re-read, For Everyone
I could not have understood the early part of my negotiating career without Getting to Yes. While I don’t believe it is the end-all-be-all for negotiation, it is worth reading … again and again. Getting to Yes, in my experience, is a reference you can trust.
Next month, I’ll review the other bookend reference work, G. Richard Shell’s Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People.