Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
When building skill-sets, negotiation is among the most revered – and elusive – tools to add to ones toolbox. Personal development is a passion project of mine and I truly believe that it is important to try to be better today than you were yesterday. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton gave me a snapshot into a world that was very unfamiliar to me: Negotiations. While I don’t intend to give away any secrets of the book, I wanted to share a few thoughts after reading the book.
Getting to the Point
This book is a fairly dry read – I would not pick this book up right before sleeping unless your intent was to wake up with the light on and the book in a random location on the bed. This is not to say that the book did not pose value to me. While I found that the examples of negotiation posed range from super applicable (ex: negotiating the price of a house or bartering at a yard sale) to out of my scope of familiarity (ex: government and political negotiations), this did not detract too much from the text as I found the examples to be rather sparse. The book was able to get to the point in 187 pages rather than having more examples than useful content and I appreciated not having to dig through 500 pages to get there. The second edition includes a section for commonly asked questions in which the text advises the reader to refer to if there are any doubts about if a section will work or it’s applicability with countering negotiation strategies. It’s a good section to add after the authors were asked questions about the strategy, presumably after the first edition was published.
Missing Links
A quick flip through this book will tell you that it isn’t an attractive text. There are no colors to break up the black & white monotony and the tables/charts are few and far between. There are no real graphics and I do not think it has an easy-to-follow structure when you are reading. Even though the chapters were properly sectioned, the instructions within the chapters were broken into multiple parts with multiple sections nested in those parts. There were times when I was in the middle of reading that I wondered where I was in the original list of instructions! I don’t mind the lack of color, but I do wish that there were an outline at the beginning of each chapter so that I could easily flip back to find my place.
In Practice
My current career does not have very many opportunities to hold negotiations and without real practice, it is difficult to know how I have improved my negotiation skills. I will say that the book did change the way that I will approach these discussions in the future and I was guilty of a lot of the “bad behaviors” that the book wants you to watch out for. Even so, it would be a differentiator if the end of the book, it came with a mock negotiation set-up that you can practice these tips with another person (or persons) to get the full benefit of practicing before the real high-stakes negotiation occurs.
If you aren’t 100% into reading a book like this that gets straight to the point with few, I highly recommend the getabstract version. Despite finding this book to have a difficult flow to follow, it is a fast read and there is definitely value in picking the book from amazon. There are parts of the book that I dog-eared and will come back to when I am preparing to go into a negotiation. It gives you a structure to follow before, during, and after a negotiation which can set you up for success in the long term!