Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In Author: Roger Fisher | Language: English | ISBN:
0143118757 | Format: PDF
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In Description
About the Author
Roger Fisher is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law Emeritus and director emeritus of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
William Ury cofounded the Harvard Negotiation Project and is the award-winning author of several books on negotiation.
Bruce Patton is cofounder and Distinguished Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project and the author of Difficult Conversations, a New York Times bestseller.
- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Revised edition (May 3, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0143118757
- ISBN-13: 978-0143118756
- Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
The title of Fisher and Ury's book is Getting to Yes - Negotiating Agreement without Giving In. It's a case where the title clearly lays out what the book is about. In Getting to Yes the authors present, step by step, how to find your way to a win-win solution that helps meet your goals while at the same time preserving the relationship so that future negotiations also go smoothly.
This book was the assigned textbook for a college course I took on negotiation, but it's one of those fairly rare cases where the material that's useful for a college course is also immensely useful for off-the-street people in a variety of situations. This book avoids complicated jargon and long, droning background chapters. Instead, it plunges into helpful information to assist people in negotiating for a new car, negotiating issues with their landlords, and all the many ways we all negotiate for our position throughout life.
Negotiation isn't just for union leaders trying to avert a strike. All of us negotiate each day as we try to juggle our many roles. We negotiate with our co-workers over assignments. We negotiate with our family members over chores. In an ideal world all of those discussions would go quickly, smoothly, and with as little strife as possible.
Getting to Yes provided numerous helpful examples which made their points more easy to understand. It is so true that people tend to remember stories where they might not remember dry text. When I think about this book I do remember several of the stories clearly, and those help to represent the points the authors were making. The stories help remind me to focus on the issues when negotiating and to look for objective standards to work with.
The information presented is wonderful, and immediately useful in life.
The premise of Getting to Yes is relatively simple; in essence the traditional view of negotiation (as a game of "give and take" between parties) is largely unproductive and can shatter working relationships between parties. Under this traditional view, parties are forced to choose between hardline negotiations (where you attempt to force your desired outcome) and softline negotiation (where you make extreme concessions in order to preserve the relationship). The authors offer a new outlook (referred to as "principled negotiation") where all parties work to make objective and rational statements about their desired outcomes (including providing empirical reasoning for their desired outcome). This new approach (summarized in the Appendix) removes the oppositional/adversarial outlook of negotiation and works to find creative solutions which satisfy the needs of all parties involved.
The model proposed is easy to use. The first step involves detaching personal politics from negotiation. Through making the negotiation about the issue at hand, the authors claim that relationships are more likely to be preserved regardless of the outcome of the negotiation. A major element of removing personal politics from the negotiation is to focus on personal interest rather than a hard position. Expressing personal interest in more lucid terms rather than abbreviated and absolute terms (e.g. "I would like to be able to sell the house and have a capital gain that would allow me to put 20% on house X" rather than "I would like to get $160,000 for the house") allows both parties to understand the interest at play and to work to explore mutually beneficial outcomes. In addition to expressing personal interests, the authors also insist that the terms of the negotiation be expressed in objective terms (i.e.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In Preview
Link
Please Wait...