Getting to Yes

Negotiating Agreement without giving in

Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton

Read by Murphy Guyer

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Getting to Yes - Negotiating Agreement without giving in Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton Audio Book CD

Brand New (still shrink wrapped):    6 hours 6 CDs

Getting to Yes is a straightforward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting taken -- and without getting angry.

It offers a concise, step-by-step, proven strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict -- whether it involves parents and children, neighbors, bosses and employees, customers or corporations, tenants or diplomats. Based on the work of Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deal continually with all levels of negotiations and conflict resolutions from domestic to business to international, Getting to Yes tells you how to:

* Separate the people from the problem
* Focus on interests, not positions
* Work together to create opinions that will satisfy both parties
* negotiate successfully with people who are more powerful, refuse to play by the rules, or resort to "dirty tricks"

About Negotiation

Negotiation is an interaction of influences. Such interactions, for example, include the process of resolving disputes, agreeing upon courses of action, bargaining for individual or collective advantage, or crafting outcomes to satisfy various interests. Negotiation is thus a form of alternative dispute resolution.

Negotiation involves three basic elements: process, behavior and substance. The process refers to how the parties negotiate: the context of the negotiations, the parties to the negotiations, the tactics used by the parties, and the sequence and stages in which all of these play out. Behaviours to the relationships among these parties, the communication between them and the styles they adopt. The substance refers to what the parties negotiate over: the agenda, the issues (positions and - more helpfully - interests), the options, and the agreement(s) reached at the end.

Skilled negotiators may use a variety of tactics ranging from negotiation hypnosis, to a straight forward presentation of demands or setting of preconditions to more deceptive approaches such as cherry picking. Intimidation and salami tactics may also play a part in swaying the outcome of negotiations. Negotiation is the one primary method of alternative dispute resolution, typically evidenced by a trained negotiator acting on behalf of a particular organization or position. Compare this to mediation where a disinterested third party listens to each sides' arguments and attempts to help craft an agreement between the parties. Lastly, arbitration is similar to a legal proceeding, whereby both sides make an argument as to the merits of their "case" and then the arbitrator decides the outcome both parties should follow (non-binding arbitration) or must follow (binding arbitration). The key to Negotiation is information.

Negotiation occurs in business, non-profit organizations, government branches, legal proceedings, among nations and in personal situations such as marriage, divorce and parenting. In the advocacy approach, a skilled negotiator usually serves as advocate for one party to the negotiation and attempts to obtain the most favorable outcomes possible for that party. In this process the negotiator attempts to determine the minimum outcome(s) the other party is (or parties are) willing to accept, then adjusts their demands accordingly. A "successful" negotiation in the advocacy approach is when the negotiator is able to obtain all or most of the outcomes their party desires, but without driving the other party to permanently break off negotiations, unless the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) is acceptable.

Traditional negotiating is sometimes called win-lose because of the assumption of a fixed "pie", that one person's gain results in another person's loss. This is only true, however, if only a single issue needs to be resolved, such as a price in a simple sales negotiation. If multiple issues are discussed, differences in the parties' preferences make win-win negotiation possible. For example, in a labor negotiation, the union might prefer job security over wage gains. If the employers have opposite preferences, a trade is possible that is beneficial to both parties. Such a negotiation is therefore not an adversarial zero-sum game.

During the early part of the twentieth century, academics such as Mary Parker Follett developed ideas suggesting that agreement often can be reached if parties look not at their stated positions but rather at their underlying interests and requirements. In the 1970s, practitioners and researchers began to develop win-win approaches to negotiation. Win-win is taken from Economic Game Theory, and has been adopted by negotiation North American academics to loosely mean Principled Negotiation. Getting to YES was published by Roger Fisher and William Ury as part of the Harvard negotiation project. The book's approach, referred to as Principled Negotiation, is also sometimes called mutual gains bargaining. The mutual gains approach has been effectively applied in environmental situations as well as labor relations where the parties (e.g. management and a labor union) frame the negotiation as "problem solving". There are a tremendous number of other scholars who have contributed to the field of negotiation, including Gerard E. Watzke at Tulane University, Sara Cobb at George Mason University, Len Riskin at the University of Missouri, Howard Raiffa at Harvard, Robert McKersie and Lawrence Susskind at MIT, and Adil Najam and Jeswald Salacuse at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Getting to Yes - Negotiating Agreement without giving in Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton Audio Book CD