Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

The summary

Most negotiation runs on positions: one side names a number, the other names a worse one, and they grind toward a middle nobody chose. Fisher, Ury and Patton judge any method on three counts — a wise agreement, reached efficiently, relationship intact — and positional bargaining fails all three. Kennedy’s 1961 nuclear test ban talks broke down over on-site inspections, the Soviets offering three and the Americans insisting on ten, though nobody had settled whether an inspection meant one person for a day or a hundred for a month. Being nice is no fix: a soft bargainer trades substance for goodwill and rewards stubbornness. The Harvard Negotiation Project’s alternative is to change the game, and it rests on four points.

Separate the people from the problem

Every negotiator has two sets of interests, the substance and the relationship, and positional bargaining pits them against each other: you concede the point to keep the peace, or hold the relationship hostage to win it. Handle the people problem in its own currency: perception, emotion, communication.

Their thinking is the problem: put yourself in their shoes and feel the force of their view without agreeing with it. Don’t deduce their intentions from your fears. Involve them early; participation decides acceptance. Let them vent without answering the substance — a labor-management committee in the 1950s steel industry ran on a rule that only one person could get angry at a time. Give their case back at its strongest, and speak about yourself rather than about them: “I feel let down” lands where “you broke your word” starts a fight.

Interests, not positions

Two men quarrel in a library over a window: open a crack, halfway, three-quarters, nothing satisfies both. The librarian asks why: one wants fresh air, the other no draft. She opens a window in the next room. A position is what you decided; your interests are what made you decide it.

Camp David, 1978. Israel had occupied the Sinai since 1967 and insisted on keeping part of it; Egypt insisted on every inch, and every map splitting the peninsula failed. Underneath sat Israel’s interest in security and Egypt’s in sovereignty, regained only lately after centuries of foreign rule. Sadat and Begin agreed to full Egyptian sovereignty with large areas demilitarized — the Egyptian flag everywhere, Egyptian tanks nowhere near Israel. Ask why they hold a position, then ask why not — what blocks the decision you want.

Invent options for mutual gain

Two children quarrel over an orange and cut it in half. One eats the fruit and throws away the peel; the other throws away the fruit and bakes with the peel. Half an orange each, when one could have had the whole fruit and the other the whole peel.

Four habits keep the options thin: judging ideas the moment they appear, hunting for the single right answer, assuming a fixed pie, and deciding that solving their problem is their problem. Invent first, decide later — brainstorm with your own side, criticism outlawed, wild ideas welcome. Then dovetail the differences: gaps in interest, belief, timing and appetite for risk are what make a trade possible in the first place.

Insist on objective criteria

Some interests really are opposed, and no invention dissolves them. Then it comes down to whose will prevails — unless you take will out of it. Your contractor wants two-foot foundations, you want five, and he offers to trade because he gave way on the roof girders. Don’t horse-trade: ask what the standard specifications are for these soil conditions.

At the Law of the Sea talks, India proposed a $60 million initial fee per deep-seabed mining site; the United States proposed none. Both dug in, until someone produced an MIT model of seabed mining economics that both sides accepted as objective. It showed India that a fee that size, payable five years before a mine earned anything, would make mining impossible, and showed the Americans that some fee was feasible. Both moved, neither looked weak. Fair procedures work the same way: one cuts, the other chooses.

Three rules govern the discussion. Frame each issue as a joint search for standards. Stay open to reason about which standard fits. Never yield to pressure, only to principle.

Your power is your alternative

A bottom line protects you badly: rigid by design, it shuts your ears to whatever you learn at the table and smothers imaginative packages. Use your BATNA instead — your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement, what you’ll actually do if you walk. Judge every offer against it and work to improve it: the better it is, the harder you can press.

A small town once negotiated factory taxes with one of the world’s largest corporations. The town knew exactly what it would do without a deal: extend the town limits to take in the factory and tax it at the full residential rate, some $2,500,000 a year. The corporation had committed to keeping the factory and developed no alternative. The small town had more power.

If they still won’t negotiate on the merits, try negotiation jujitsu: don’t push back against an attack, sidestep it and deflect it against the problem. Ask questions instead of statements — statements generate resistance, questions generate answers — then be quiet; some of the most effective negotiating happens while you aren’t talking.

The bottom line

Stop trying to win a contest of wills and start working a shared problem: soft on the people, hard on the merits, settled by standards neither side invented. Your strength comes from knowing exactly what you’ll do if you walk away, not from refusing to move. Read it if you bargain over anything — a salary, a lease, a treaty, a bedtime — and want a method instead of a bag of tricks.