Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton

After starting out on varied career paths, Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton came to Getting to Yes by means of the Harvard Negotiation Project. After doing weather reconnaissance in World War II, Roger Fisher decided to dedicate his life to stopping future wars. He attended Harvard Law School and then worked in the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and the United States Department of Justice. He went on to teach for more than 40 years at Harvard Law, where he pioneered conflict resolution as an academic discipline. In addition to forming the Harvard Negotiation Project in 1979, Fisher helped mediate some of the most significant peace deals of the 20th century, like the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, the negotiations that ended the Salvadoran Civil War, and the negotiations that ended apartheid and established democracy in South Africa in the early 1990s. William Ury trained as a social anthropologist at Harvard, where he learned to apply the discipline’s sensitivity to differences in culture and perspective to conflict prevention throughout the world. He began working with Fisher as a graduate student and eventually published a dissertation on labor disputes in a Kentucky coal mine, but he’s always focused his career on conflict resolution. He has negotiated to end wars in—among others—Colombia, Indonesia, and the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. He also founded the International Negotiation Network in collaboration with American president Jimmy Carter, and he has since started the Abraham Path Initiative, which promotes hiking in the Middle East as a solution to social and religious animosity. Like Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton was also a Harvard Law School professor for several decades. Originally the editor of Getting to Yes, he became a coauthor on the book’s second and third editions. He now runs Vantage Partners, a management consulting company based in Boston. The Harvard Negotiation Project continues working to promote the field of conflict negotiation studies in both university and public contexts.