Getting To Yes Summary

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury discusses the art of principled negotiation, a negotiation method developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project that aims to produce effective, lasting, and fair agreements between parties. It is a diverse method that devised to work in nearly any given negotiation situation regardless of the parties involved, whether one is more experienced in bargaining than another, knows the strategy better than the other, etc. In their book, Fisher and Ury begin by outlining the issues related to negotiations and then by providing four principles on how to apply principled negotiation. The book ends by addressing the most common questions people have about the method. Fisher and Ury state that the most common issues surrounding negotiation is that people often negotiate by bargaining over positions, meaning that negotiations often consist of people taking a particular stance and trying to bargain with the opposing side. This also causes parties to take hard or soft approaches when negotiating, which promotes stubbornness and vulnerability while focusing on the relationship of the sides rather

In particular, I think that a lot of the negotiating methods and information from the book can be applied by HAs to improve one’s communication and conflict management skills. Fisher and Ury themselves state that negotiation is something that takes place in many settings -- whether in a formal business setting or in casual day to day negotiations. After being in the HA role for a quarter now and having dealt with various situations related to roommate/apartment issues and others related to managing conflicts between people, I do believe that the information in Getting to Yes provides a lot of valuable insight that could be useful in preparation of these