Getting to Yes Themes

Getting to Yes, an influential guide to successful negotiation by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, begins by noting that negotiations are everywhere in modern life. While the word “negotiation” might remind readers of heated business meetings or formal legal disputes, the authors of this book propose a much wider view of the concept. According to them, a negotiation is any situation in which multiple people have to work together and find…

According to the authors of Getting to Yes, many people waste valuable time and energy focusing on things that are totally irrelevant to their actual goals in a negotiation. They might attack other parties’ moral character or refuse to accept anything besides the exact solution they are envisioning, especially when they approach negotiations through the lens of positional bargaining. Such negotiators get too caught up in the game and lose sight of why…

One significant difficulty in the negotiation theory presented in Getting to Yes is that it only works smoothly if all parties have roughly equal power. For example, activists negotiating with the government, small businesses negotiating with giant international conglomerates, and employees negotiating with management often have to cope with overwhelming inequalities in power. In such situations, the more powerful party in the negotiation has little to gain by playing fair, and so underdogs have to…

The authors of Getting to Yes advocate two contrasting principles in their theory of principled negotiation: they repeatedly say that negotiators must be well-prepared, but they also insist that they be flexible during the process of negotiation itself. In fact, it is important to combine preparation and flexibility precisely because they serve complementary functions, and the best negotiators specifically prepare in a way that boosts their flexibility during a negotiation.

Effective negotiators must be…