Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Getting to Yes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Effective Negotiation
Negotiation as the Pursuit of Interests
The Value of Working Relationships
Power Imbalance
Preparation and Flexibility
Summary
Analysis
Even though people might not realize it, everybody negotiates things all the time. A negotiation is any situation in which multiple parties with different interests have to communicate in order to agree on an outcome. Over time, organizations are becoming less and less hierarchical, and negotiation is becoming a more and more important skill.
The authors open Getting to Yes by asking readers to reconsider their instinctive view of what counts as a “negotiation.” The tools outlined in this book can be applied to a wide variety of situations—any case in which two or more parties have to take action on something that implicates all of them. So rather than picturing a stuffy business meeting, readers should think about all the situations in their daily life when they have to come to an agreement with someone else.
Themes
But it can be difficult to negotiate well without becoming “dissatisfied, worn out, or alienated.” Generally, people are either soft or hard negotiators. Soft negotiators want to avoid conflict, but this often leads them to give up what they want. Hard negotiators care mostly about winning but often alienate or exhaust others in the process. So neither strategy ends up being successful.
One of the reasons people tend to associate negotiation with resolving bitter conflicts in business and government contexts—rather than with their everyday lives—is precisely that they expect all negotiations to be difficult, destroy relationships, and leave people “dissatisfied, worn out, or alienated.” But the authors want readers to see negotiation as something to be valued and sought out, not something uncomfortable to be avoided. Of course, this hesitancy about negotiations is precisely what drives soft negotiators to try avoiding conflict. And conversely, hard negotiators seek out and thrive on negotiations only by turning them into destructive conflicts—which is why hard bargainers avoid negotiation in the first place. In short, in order for people to value and benefit from negotiation, there needs to be a third way to negotiate that is neither hard nor soft.
Themes
In Getting to Yes, authors Fisher, Ury, and Patton propose a theory of principled negotiation that combines aspects of hard and soft negotiation. This strategy requires identifying shared goals and evaluating competing interests based on fair, independent criteria. Principled negotiation can be applied in contexts ranging from government policy and hostage negotiation to everyday decision-making in a marriage or family. It is widely applicable in all kinds of negotiations, regardless of the problems, parties, or stakes involved.
In addition to asking their readers to reconceptualize the scope of what counts as negotiation, the authors ask them to start viewing negotiation as collaboration, not conflict. Accordingly, principled negotiation is not a middle ground between hard and soft negotiation—rather, it is an entirely separate approached based on a total reconceptualization of what a negotiation actually is in the first place. Whereas hard and soft bargainers assume that they can either get what they want or preserve their amicable relationship with the other side, principled negotiation builds an amicable relationship in order to give everyone as much as possible of what they want.
Themes
