In this post, I present a mind map with the summary of the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton. (To skip the rest of the post and go directly to the online mind map, click here.)

First Things First

Like it or not, you are a negotiator.

We tend to have a mental image of negotiation as being something restricted to executives in large corporations or politicians arranging complex deals. But negotiation is a skill that everybody uses every day; not only when buying a car or asking for a raise, but in a myriad of trivial situations such as when agreeing with somebody on which restaurant to go or which movie to watch.

Learning to better negotiate is more useful than you would probably think.

The Negotiation Dilemma

I was always averse to the whole idea of negotiation (just like I was to business networking). I always saw it as a contest of wills, where one side tries to win by subduing the other — either by exerting power or by using manipulative techniques. No wonder I tried to avoid it as much as I could.

This mindset makes many of us face a dilemma: without knowing any better, we end up having to choose between the only two forms of negotiation we know: soft or hard.

From the book:

[…] The soft negotiator wants to avoid personal conflict and so makes concessions readily in order to reach agreement. He wants an amicable resolution; yet he often ends up exploited and feeling bitter.

The hard negotiator sees any situation as a contest of wills in which the side that takes the more extreme positions and holds out longer fares better. He wants to win; yet he often ends up producing an equally hard response which exhausts him and his resources and harms his relationship with the other side. (p. xvii)

Enter Principled Negotiation

The solution to this dilemma is to avoid the hard and soft positioning altogether by using a third alternative called Principled Negotiation. This method, which is described in detail in the book, is based on four principles:

1. Separate the people from the problem
2. Focus on interests, not positions
3. Invent options for mutual gain
4. Insist on using objective criteria

To have a quick overview on how these four principles apply in practice, compare the attitudes involved from the point of view of soft, hard and ‘principled’ negotiators:

What If the Other Side Doesn’t Collaborate?

“All nice in theory”, you might say, “but what if the other part I’m negotiating with doesn’t give a damn about this ‘principled negotiation’ thing?”

That’s exactly what I thought when reading the book for the first time; and exactly what the book promptly dealt with (don’t you love when authors read your mind?). The questions “What if they’re more powerful?”, “What if they won’t play nice” and “What if they use dirty tricks?” each get their own chapter with specific techniques you can use to tame the hard bargainer.

Full Book Summary

Find below the links to the mind map with the full contents of the book.

As usual, this summary was created so I could quickly recall the book as well as pass the knowledge along to others. I loved this book and hope you enjoy it too!

Get the mind map for Getting to Yes:

• Online interactive version
  Viewable in your browser, requires Flash Player.
• Download map in MindManager format
  212 kb, requires MindManager.
• Download map in FreeMind format
  87 kb, requires FreeMind.

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