Getting to Yes
Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
Roger Fisher and William Ury · 1981 · Communication
14 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Fisher and Ury argue that most negotiation advice pushes people toward either soft accommodation or hard combat, and both fail. Their alternative, developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project, is 'principled negotiation': separate people from the problem, focus on underlying interests rather than stated positions, invent options before deciding, and judge outcomes against fair standards rather than willpower. Published in 1981, the book reframed negotiation as a joint problem-solving exercise rather than a contest, and became the standard reference for business, diplomatic, and legal training for decades after.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A manager who dreads salary and contract negotiations and wants a repeatable method instead of gut instinct. - A mediator or lawyer who needs language for moving clients off rigid demands without losing their trust. - Anyone stuck in a recurring family or workplace conflict who keeps winning arguments and losing relationships.
What’s inside
- 1Positional Bargaining Fails on Its Own Terms1 min
Arguing over fixed positions produces worse outcomes than a method built around interests, even when one side 'wins.'
- 2Separate the People from the Problem1 min
Treating relationship friction and substantive disagreement as one tangled issue guarantees that emotional conflict will sabotage practical solutions.
- 3Interests, Not Positions, Are What People Actually Want1 min
A stated position is only one solution to an underlying interest, and fixating on it hides better solutions that would satisfy both sides more fully.
- 4Invent Options Before Committing to Any of Them1 min
Negotiators judge and narrow options too early, which suppresses the creative combinations that would satisfy both sides better than any option generated under pressure.
- 5Insist on Objective Criteria, Not Willpower1 min
Deciding a disagreement by whoever has more leverage or stubbornness produces resentment and unstable agreements, while deciding it by a fair external standard produces outcomes both sides can defend.
- 6Know Your Walk-Away Point: The Power of BATNA1 min
Relying on a fixed bottom line before entering a negotiation is a worse safeguard than knowing your best alternative to agreement, because a bottom line can be arbitrary while an alternative is real.
- 7Negotiating With Someone More Powerful, or Someone Playing Dirty1 min
Principled negotiation is not naive cooperation, because it includes specific countermoves for imbalanced power and bad-faith tactics rather than assuming good faith will be reciprocated.
- 8WEAKNESSES: Where the Method Runs Thin2 min
The book's confidence that objective criteria and shared interests can resolve most conflicts underestimates how often negotiations involve genuinely zero-sum stakes, deep power asymmetries, or cultural differences the framework does not account for.
About Roger Fisher and William Ury
Roger Fisher was a Harvard Law School professor and founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, who advised on international disputes including Middle East peace talks. William Ury, a social anthropologist, co-founded the same project and later worked on nuclear crisis negotiation and global mediation. Their combined academic and field experience shaped the book's practical, case-tested framework.
