Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

I picked this book up from the business library after seeing Charlie Munger’s recommendation for it, and it is a wealth of practical information – most of the bigger ideas everyone knows, but they are presented in a way that is methodical and original. Getting to Yes focuses on the method that the authors call “principled negotiation”, in which instead of making negotiation a contest of wills of who can hold their position the longest without conceding, it makes negotiation into a mutual exploration into how the two sides can each come out the best, reaching the result efficiently while preserving the relationship for the future. The four main parts of this method of negotiation is first solving the people problem including talking about emotions and perceptions, and look behind positions to find key fundamental interests. Given these interests, invent options that focus on mutual benefit and dovetail differing interests. If differences persist, agree on some outside, objective criteria that seems most fair to both parties. After reading I’ve made a graph representation of the most important ideas from the book, and if you want to see it please contact me.

One of the great ideas in the book is the relationship between negotiating power and the idea of the BATNA: the best alternative to negotiated agreement. The book goes into much more depth, but in general we think of power in negotiation as our resources pitted against our opponent’s resources: if the opponent is well-connected and well-funded, we would likely think we have less power. Yet, our BATNA is actually the determinant of how much power we have. If we have a great best alternative that we can execute without negotiating, then we have more leverage to walk away from the table in case negotiations don’t go our way. This makes developing the BATNA one of the most important preparation steps to negotiation as without it, we don’t know how much leverage we have in the talks. In developing our own BATNA, it’s also useful as a sanity check to study the other side and see what their possible BATNAs are. If their BATNA is weak, then it opens room for more aggressive demands on our end, whereas if their BATNA is too strong, they might not have any incentive to negotiate; in the second case, it’s wiser to affect the situation to weaken their BATNA first than to go directly to the negotiating table.