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Getting to Yes

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Getting to Yes

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In – Roger Fisher, William Ury – 200 pages, Paperback; ISBN: 0140157352; Penguin Press

Reviewed by: G.A. “Andy” Marken, Marken Communications Inc., andy@markencom.com


Having a tough time getting a job, a raise, a new client?

Having difficulty in getting programs approved or your staff all moving in the same direction?

Whether it’s in your personal or professional life, it’s all about negotiations. While Getting to Yes will be an assist to you, don’t look to the book as the definitive formula on the subject.

Getting to Yes will help you at work and at home but its shortcoming is that it is long on the sterility of the closed academic environment and short on the reality of the ambiguities of the world you move in.

In this field we interact with and work with people all of the time – inside and outside the organization. If you analyze it closely perhaps 60 percent of your time is spent interrelating with people, working with them to reach an acceptable agreement.

If you work with international companies as we do, the challenge is understanding the cultural barriers and individual differences and that in no situation is there a black or white, right or wrong but a massive middle ground that two parties have to meet and work within. In both personal and professional negotiations there is the essence of mutual gains and your ability to move to this area will determine how quickly and successfully you get to yes.

The value of Getting to Yes is that it helps you understand that you have to be hard on the problems and easy on the individuals. You need to constantly work at building relationships. A fast, easy book to read, Getting to Yes will be helpful in determining what people want and how to develop alternative paths and solutions that enable everyone to win. That’s the foundation of successful negotiations.

Ury and Fisher base much of their book on the sterile, academic approach that problems exist objectively and that they can be analyzed on their own merits…independent of people’s perceptions, attributions and relationships. That sounds great and works great…in the lab or classroom. Unfortunately we don’t operate in this sterile, controlled environment. Individuals are an integral part of the situation because if people aren’t involved…no problem exists.

The keys to honing your negotiation ability is how well you pay attention to both the problem and the individuals, understanding their real or perceived interests and offering alternatives or solutions that meet the needs of both the problem and the individual.

Negotiations would be delightfully simple, painless and successful if everyone adhered to the authors’ principles of negotiations. But to paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get until you bite into it.”

To their credit though the authors do provide you with a good set of tools that can be used as long as they aren’t blindly applied in every situation. Read and reread Getting to Yes and you’ll soon be able to determine which tool is right when you are negotiating. Eventually you’ll be able to improvise on the fly and determine that it isn’t about positions but about individual interests. Getting to Yes guidelines will help you more and more as you understand them, modify them and practice them.

Of course they may come up short when you’re in the middle of negotiations with your spouse or kids. In many of these situations the problem is secondary. The individual position is everything.

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