Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, Bruce Patton

As authors Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton essentially state, there are probably little, if any, truly new concepts in this book. Like Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the real benefit of this material is to organize or codify the underlying principles that generate results.

In Getting to Yes, the authors provide real value in coining the terms BATNA and Negotiation Jiujitsu, as they make it easier to keep these critical negotiation tools top of mind.

They also provide usage scenarios that really drive home practical application. Furthermore Getting to Yes provides real-world negotiation tips including deciding where to conduct negotiations (your place or mine) and even where to sit at the table.

The meat of the advice is strikingly aligned with Stephen Covey's advice of "Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood" as means generating a feeling of openess in order to work around position-based negotiations.

Getting to Yes also effectively illustrates the real value -or lack thereof- of power in a negotiation. The illustration of a wealthy tourist negotiating with a street hawker resulting in weaker position to the tourist truly works.

They also bring home the value of separating the person from the position and this also aligns well with Stephen Covey's "Think Win-Win" and "Abundance Mentality" concepts. This truism is again brought home in the section that essentially restates that personal attacks or criticism can be viewed as actually and genuinely beneficial inputs, helping us to appreciate better our blind spots transforming the experience into something truly positive. Again it's Think Win-Win.

Getting to Yes is not without flaws though. One part of the book cautions against falling for good cop-bad cop routines and advises that turnaround is fair play. If your counterpart invokes this tactic towards the end of what seemed like productive negotiations, you should feel free to take it as an opening to consider all prior agreements as preliminary and yet later in the book they advocate invoking precisely the same tactic as a means of ensuring one does not later regret an agreement they have mutually developed but which may later be regretted as rash.

In sum, it's a worthwhile read, just don't expect any epiphanies. I rate this work at 3.5 out of 5 stars.