Getting to Yes

Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Roger Fisher and William Ury · 1981 · Communication

14 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice

Original summary · AI-drafted, human-published · added by Library

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

1
Positional Bargaining Fails on Its Own Terms
Arguing over fixed positions produces worse outcomes than a method built around interests, even when one side 'wins.'
1 min
2
Separate the People from the Problem
Treating relationship friction and substantive disagreement as one tangled issue guarantees that emotional conflict will sabotage practical solutions.
1 min
3
Interests, Not Positions, Are What People Actually Want
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.
1 min
4
Invent Options Before Committing to Any of Them
Negotiators judge and narrow options too early, which suppresses the creative combinations that would satisfy both sides better than any option generated under pressure.
1 min
5
Insist on Objective Criteria, Not Willpower
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.
1 min
6
Know Your Walk-Away Point: The Power of BATNA
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.
1 min
7
Negotiating With Someone More Powerful, or Someone Playing Dirty
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.
1 min
8
WEAKNESSES: Where the Method Runs Thin
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.
2 min
9
WEAKNESSES: Where the Method Runs Thin
2 min
10
Final summary
1 min
11
Actionable advice
1 min

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.