Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Miles: September, nineteen seventy eight, at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland hills. The president of Egypt and the prime minister of Israel are there with Jimmy Carter, and the question that won't move is the Sinai, the desert peninsula Israel has held since the war of nineteen sixty seven.

Miles: In the book's telling, Israel wants to keep part of it and Egypt wants every bit of it back. Draw the line wherever you like on the map, and one of them goes home.

Miles: So the American team stops proposing lines. It writes a single draft nobody has signed up to, asks both delegations to pull it apart, and writes it again. Then again. After thirteen days and something like twenty three drafts, Carter puts the text forward, and Egypt and Israel both accept it.

Miles: Today: Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury. In two sentences: stop haggling over what each side says it'll settle for and work on what each side needs, then settle the dividing by standards neither side gets to write. Its first rule is to separate the person from the problem, and Nora's going to argue that some people were living by that rule long before anyone printed it, and paying for it.

Miles: Sixty Books. Presented by Stoar Consulting and Coaching.

Miles: Book forty seven of Sixty Books, with me, Miles. The arrangement stands: sixty management titles picked from the last hundred years, taken one per episode, each read for the leaders and teams whose minds take a different route, and for a working day that has AI in it now. Nora has the research, and a new movement starts here, on the conversations where things get decided.

Miles: Nora, Lencioni left us with the meeting repaired and the rest of the work sitting in whatever people say once they're in it.

Nora: And this book walks into that room and makes an odd first request. Stop telling the other side what you want.

Miles: Bold advice from a book about negotiating.

Nora: Tell them why you want it instead. The what is where people dig in. The why is usually where the room to move is.

Miles: Back to the desert. What does the book make of Camp David?

Nora: It uses it twice. In the chapter on interests, it's two positions that can't both be met, resting on interests that can. Israel's interest was security, no Egyptian forces built up on its border. Egypt's was sovereignty. The land had been Egyptian and Egypt wanted it back.

Miles: And the deal gave each of them the thing underneath.

Nora: In the book's account, yes. The Sinai went back to Egypt, on condition that Egyptian forces there stay strictly limited. Not a line halfway across the sand, a different kind of answer.

Miles: And the second time?

Nora: Near the end, as a technique for when the other side won't stop trading positions. The authors call it the one text procedure. Someone in the middle lists both sides' interests, drafts a plan nobody is committed to, asks each side for criticism, and improves it until it can't be improved. Then the parties make one decision at the end, instead of a hundred small concessions on the way.

Miles: And the book's general claim?

Nora: That most people negotiate soft or hard, and both fail. The soft negotiator makes concessions to keep the peace and gets taken advantage of. The hard negotiator turns it into a contest of wills and damages everything around the deal. The third way they call principled negotiation, judged by three tests. Does it reach a wise agreement, if one is possible. Is it efficient. And does it improve the relationship, or at least leave it no worse. The book's own short form is hard on the merits, soft on the people.

Miles: The authors.

Nora: Roger Fisher first. Born in nineteen twenty two in Winnetka, Illinois. Harvard College, then the war, on weather reconnaissance for the Army Air Forces over the North Atlantic and the Pacific. Harvard Law School in nineteen forty eight, then Paris, working on the Marshall Plan under Averell Harriman. He joined the Harvard law faculty in nineteen fifty eight, and in nineteen seventy nine he co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, with William Ury and Bruce Patton, and directed it. He died in August of twenty twelve, at ninety.

Miles: There's a story coming. I can hear it.

Nora: From the same year as the book. In March of nineteen eighty one, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he proposed sealing the code for launching nuclear weapons in a capsule beside the heart of a volunteer who'd walk next to the president. To use it, the president would first have to kill one person, with his own hands.

Miles: That's the reverse of this book's first rule.

Nora: Yeah. The reverse of it, and he said why in the article: the president should have to look at someone and see what an innocent death is. Friends at the Pentagon told him that having to kill someone would distort the president's judgment, and that he might never push the button.

Miles: And Ury?

Nora: Twenty two, and a graduate student in social anthropology at Harvard, when it began. In his own telling, he'd written a paper taking an anthropologist's view of the Middle East peace talks, and in January of nineteen seventy seven Fisher rang him, said he'd read it, and asked him to come and work with him.

Miles: And Patton?

Nora: He edited the first edition and became a co-author only with the second, in nineteen ninety one, which added a section answering ten questions readers kept asking. The first edition came from Houghton Mifflin in nineteen eighty one. Three years later Fisher wrote that it had a third of a million copies in print and twelve foreign editions. Harvard Law School's notice when he died put it at more than three million, in twenty three languages.

Miles: Front to back, then.

Nora: Chapter one is the case against bargaining over positions. Each side names a figure, defends it, and gives ground in small pieces. The longer you defend a position, the more face you have riding on it, so the deal gets fitted to the positions rather than to anyone's interests, and getting there is slow and bruising.

Miles: Chapter two is the one you're here for.

Nora: Separate the people from the problem. Negotiators are people first, it says, and every negotiator has two kinds of interest, one in the substance and one in the relationship. The trouble starts when the two get tangled, and a remark about the proposal lands as a remark about whoever made it. So run them on separate tracks. On the people track: see it from where they sit, recognize the feelings in the room, theirs and yours, listen actively and say back what you heard, and talk about how something affects you rather than what they did. On the substance, stay as firm as you need to.

Miles: Chapter three.

Nora: Interests, not positions, and the book's best known story. Two men in a library are arguing over a window. One wants it open, the other wants it closed. The librarian asks each of them why. One wants fresh air, the other wants to avoid a draft, so she opens a window in the next room.

Miles: Everyone gets the air they came for.

Nora: And the story is older than the book. Mary Parker Follett told it in a talk in nineteen twenty five, and it happened to her, in one of the small rooms of the Harvard Library. Somebody wanted the window open, and Follett wanted it shut.

Miles: So one of the two men was her.

Nora: Yeah. One of the two men was her, and the book thanks her for the story in its acknowledgements. The method is to ask why, and why not, for every position, and expect interests underneath like security, belonging, recognition and autonomy.

Miles: Four.

Nora: Inventing options for mutual gain. Among the blocks it names are judging too early and assuming the pie is fixed, and the fix it leans on hardest is to separate inventing from deciding: brainstorm first, ideally side by side, criticism held back until later. Then the orange. Two children quarrel over one and split it down the middle. One eats the fruit and throws away the peel. The other wanted only the peel.

Miles: So each child threw away what the other one needed.

Nora: The book calls the fix dovetailing. Look for what the two of you value differently, because a difference is where a trade gets cheap. Chapter five is standards neither side controls. Market value, precedent, professional standards, equal treatment. Or a fair procedure, like one cuts and the other chooses. And the rule is to give way to principle, never to pressure.

Miles: And then the hard cases.

Nora: Three, under the heading Yes, But. If they're more powerful, develop your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, which the book shortens to BATNA. A bottom line locks you in. A BATNA is what you'll do if this falls through, made as good and as concrete as you can, so every offer gets weighed against it.

Miles: That's Covey's no deal from episode thirty, with a number on it.

Nora: And eight years before Covey. No deal is a stance. A BATNA is a plan you've priced. If they won't play, use what the book calls negotiation jujitsu. Don't attack their position, look behind it. Don't defend your idea, ask for their criticism. Recast an attack on you as an attack on the problem, and ask questions instead of pushing back. And for dirty tricks, recognize the tactic, say out loud that you've seen it, and negotiate over the rules of the game like anything else.

Miles: Huh.

Miles: The evidence. Where do you even begin with a book like this?

Nora: With what it's built on. It came out of the project's casework, teaching and interviews, and its proof is stories, from Camp David to an insurance claim on a wrecked car. There's no experiment in it. Within three years a law professor said so in print. James White, of the University of Michigan Law School, in the Journal of Legal Education, nineteen eighty four.

Miles: And his case?

Nora: He called it a puzzling book, frequently naive, occasionally self righteous, but often helpful. He praised its attack on old fashioned haggling. His central complaint was that the authors seemed to assume a clever negotiator could turn any negotiation into problem solving, when the most demanding part of nearly every negotiation, as he saw it, is dividing what's there. Standards, he argued, mostly lend one side's position an air of reasonableness. And the book left out things that affect outcomes, like how high you open and how fast you concede.

Miles: That's a review with teeth.

Nora: And Fisher answered in the same issue, which is the half people forget. White, he said, was describing how people negotiate, and he was advising how they ought to. He held his ground on the main point: deciding who gets the last dollar is itself a problem both sides share, so you can still look together for a fair way to settle it. His picture was two men in a lifeboat dividing rations, who share an interest in not tipping the boat over.

Miles: Did he give anything up?

Nora: Several things. Students had taught him that positional bargaining can work best in some cases, a single issue between strangers, for one. The book blurs describing and prescribing. And the heading Separate the People from the Problem puts the matter too broadly, he wrote, because in some cases the people are the problem. Hold that for our segment.

Miles: So what's the research said since?

Nora: Four strands, and they split the points between the two men. First, shared gains get missed. Thompson and Hastie, nineteen ninety, two studies of people negotiating in pairs. Most began by assuming the other side wanted the opposite of everything they wanted, and the ones who worked out sooner that it wasn't so did better. That's the book's fixed pie, measured.

Miles: One to Fisher.

Nora: Second, the alternative. Pinkley, Neale and Bennett, nineteen ninety four, a study of negotiating pairs. Having an alternative raised your own outcome and the joint one, a more valuable alternative raised both further, and the better yours was compared with theirs, the larger your share.

Miles: So the BATNA's confirmed.

Nora: And White's point about power, in the same result, because the alternative moves the split. Third, first offers, which White said the book left out. Petrowsky and colleagues, twenty twenty five, a meta-analysis registered in advance, ninety studies and more than sixteen thousand participants, plus two new experiments. Making the first offer helped, and an ambitious opening raised the final deal. But ambitious openings also brought more impasses, and the people on the receiving end felt worse about the result. Both effects weakened as more issues came onto the table.

Miles: So White was right about openings, and the book's world is where they count least.

Nora: That's about where it lands, and the price of opening hard gets paid in the relationship the book keeps asking you to protect. Fourth, the pairing in the book's own short form. De Dreu, Weingart and Kwon pooled twenty eight studies in two thousand. Negotiators who cared about the other side's outcome solved more problems and reached better joint deals, but only when they were also firm about their own.

Miles: A point for the book.

Nora: It is. The complication is anger. Van Kleef, De Dreu and Manstead, twenty oh four, three experiments with people negotiating by computer. They conceded more to an opponent described as angry than to a happy one, reading the anger as a signal of where the opponent's limit was. Emotion isn't only noise to be calmed. It carries information, and sometimes it pays.

Miles: Tier statement.

Nora: Getting to Yes is practitioner literature, built from casework and teaching, not peer reviewed research, and it never presented itself as anything else. Four decades of experiments have been kind to its core: shared gains get missed, alternatives matter, and firm with considerate beats either one alone. They've been less kind to the hope that every division can become joint problem solving. On my running score the method holds and the subtitle promises a little more than the record shows, and none of that is a verdict on the authors or their critic.

Miles: Our half.

Nora: And the claim runs past the evidence, so I'll mark it first. Separating the person from the problem turns into a rule something literal thinkers tend to do without being taught, and get marked down for. That's an argument, and I'll show you where it rests on research and where it doesn't.

Miles: Who counts as a literal thinker?

Nora: It's a style, not a diagnosis. Someone who takes the words as the message, answers the question that was asked, and can tell you your proposal has a hole in it without meaning anything about you. It overlaps with autism in the research, though less neatly than the stereotype says. Kalandadze and colleagues, in the journal Autism, pooled forty one studies on figurative language. Autistic groups understood it less well than comparison groups on average, but matched on core language ability, the gap became small and not significant.

Miles: Then where's the penalty?

Nora: In how the style lands. Sasson and colleagues, twenty seventeen, which we met in episode forty. Observers formed less favorable impressions of autistic adults within seconds, and the gap disappeared when all they had was what was said. The authors' own summary is that style, not substance, drives the impression. Then Crompton and colleagues, twenty twenty, seventy two people talking in pairs. Non autistic pairs reported the most rapport, autistic pairs came next, and the mixed pairs reported the least. Observers watching recordings also rated the mixed pairs lowest.

Miles: So the friction lives in the mismatch.

Nora: In those samples, yes. And a third line of work sits right on this book. Farmer, Baron-Cohen and Skylark, twenty seventeen, an online study registered in advance, ninety autistic adults from a university research register and two hundred and twelve comparison adults, choosing between products. When an unappealing third option was added to the set, the comparison group's choices swung, and the autistic group's swung less. The authors describe it as decisions less swayed by context.

Miles: Which sounds like giving way to principle and not to pressure.

Nora: That's my reading, and here's the argument whole. The book asks negotiators to judge a proposal on its merits, by a standard, without letting the wrapping move them, and to keep their feelings about each other on a separate track. On those group findings, some people already lean that way. In an ordinary meeting the same habit gets read as cold or blunt. Inside this book, it's the method.

Miles: And what does a leader do with that?

Nora: Make the separation the room's rule, out loud, before anything gets difficult. We'll be firm about the problem and easy on each other, and that holds for everybody, including the people who were counting on hints. Write the interests up where everyone can see them, so nobody has to read them off a face. And give the relationship its own item: thanks, acknowledgement, how people are doing, said plainly rather than left to guesswork.

Miles: Cautions.

Nora: Two. First, the line through all of this is mine. Nobody has tested this book's method with neurodivergent negotiators as the outcome. I've set a meta-analysis on figurative language, two studies of impressions and rapport, and one of decision consistency beside a book about negotiating, and joined them myself. Call it an argument, not a result.

Miles: And the second.

Nora: Fisher's own concession. Sometimes the people are the problem, and the anger experiments say feelings carry information. So separating the tracks doesn't mean dropping one. Someone who's naturally strong on the substance still has the relationship work to do, and what the book offers is that work written out step by step, rather than left to instinct.

Miles: Fair enough.

Miles: One minute, through this show's lens. Getting to Yes says stop trading positions and work on interests, invent before you decide, settle the dividing by standards neither side owns, and know what you'll do if the talks fail. For anybody leading a mind that takes words at their word, or working inside one, here's Monday. Before your next hard conversation, write down your interests, your best guess at theirs, and your best alternative, and bring the page. Open by saying plainly that you'll be firm on the problem and easy on the people, so a blunt point about a proposal isn't heard as a point about a person. Put the relationship on the agenda as its own item, with thanks said out loud rather than hinted at. And when someone leans on you, ask which standard their number came from.

Miles: And the machines.

Nora: The fixed note on these tools comes after the closing music, in the same words every time, so I'll send you there for it and spend this stretch on what Fisher and Ury would make of them.

Miles: Go on.

Nora: Somebody put this book's ideas in front of machines. Vaccaro, Caosun, Ju, Aral and Curhan, a preprint, not yet through peer review. In February of twenty twenty five they ran an online competition where entrants from more than forty countries wrote instructions for AI agents, and the agents negotiated with each other more than a hundred and eighty thousand times, over a chair, a rental lease and a job offer.

Miles: And the ruthless bots cleaned up.

Nora: The reverse. Warmth went with better results on every main measure the organizers scored. Dominant agents were good at claiming value, but the long, drawn out conversations that went with dominance were strongly tied to impasse. And warmth on its own wasn't enough. The agents that did well also argued for their own side.

Miles: Hard on the merits, soft on the people, in software.

Nora: Yeah. In software. And one of the strongest value claimers used a trick only a machine falls for, slipping instructions into its messages to get the other agent to give away private information. A dirty trick the book would recognize, arriving by a new route.

Miles: And for a person getting ready to negotiate?

Nora: Three uses. Interests: describe your position and have it ask you why, then have it guess at theirs, and treat each guess as a question to ask them, not a fact. Options: have it invent twenty possibilities with no judging allowed, and do the deciding later, yourself. Standards: ask which market rates or precedents might apply, then check every one, because a standard that turns out to be invented hands the other side the argument.

Miles: Send us off with something.

Nora: Give it the inventing half of the book. A tool can invent options all evening without tiring. The deciding stays with you, and so does the person across the table.

Miles: That's Getting to Yes.

Miles: Next time: Difficult Conversations, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen, from nineteen ninety nine and the same Harvard Negotiation Project. Every tool in this book assumes both sides walk in knowing what they want, and the next one starts with the conversations where nobody does yet.

Nora: Which picks up right where Fisher's own concession left off, with the people as the problem.

Miles: Nora, you kept the people and the problem apart for a whole episode. Thank you.

Nora: Count me in for the next.

Miles: Right, next one.

Miles: Sixty Books is made for you by Stoar Consulting and Coaching. Logan Williamson is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas and Louisiana. This episode read one book on behalf of the people who lead teams and the people who work on them. None of it was coaching or counseling, and none of it was about you.

Nora: Each claim's source is listed on the episode page, next to the transcript. Book forty eight follows in two days.

Miles: Who made this, before you go. Neither Miles nor Nora is a person; both voices are synthetic. Neither of us holds a license, and nothing either of us said was about anyone listening. AI assists with the draft of every script, and Logan Williamson, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas and Louisiana, at Stoar Consulting and Coaching, edits each one and signs it off.

Nora: And one note about the AI segment. The evidence that these tools help neurodivergent people at work is early. There are controlled trials now, but they measure things like conversation skill rather than how a job actually goes, and for work itself most of what exists is individual providers reporting success. So take it as promising and not proven. The tools also get rebuilt every few months, so whatever you set up today is built on something that moves.