Getting to Yes

Great book about negotiating in all aspects of life. Main point: Treat negotiating as a cooperative task of finding the compromise most beneficial to both sides.

The underlying premise of the book is Keeping a flexible mind and making a real effort to understand someone’s underlying motivations as well as what they are trying to accomplish. This baseline will help you to find common ground in difficult negotiations and create mutually beneficial and long-lasting agreements. The best agreements, from my experience, are the ones where both parties find great value in the agreement and it is built on solid and transparent fundamentals. This book has also helped me in creating mutually beneficial partnerships with partners and investors in my company, ABM Investments. During the reading of “Getting to Yes” I was managing operations on a remote island and one of my workers was shot with a bow and arrow and stabbed with a spear. We all could have been injured or killed as we were stuck on an island with no way out, but I sat with the local leader and both men involved and negotiated a peaceful truce. In large part due to the principles in “Getting to Yes”, we managed to avoid a war with hundreds of villagers. My one hundred men team was only at twenty at that point as many had gone home between projects. It would not have ended well for us, so thankfully we made it out peacefully.

This book changed how I think about negotiation. Instead of seeing it as an adversarial “me vs. them” process that was all about winning, it made me think about getting what I really wanted in a way that would preserve and grow relationships. One of the most important pieces of advice was the need to understand your counterpart and what their needs are. When you have that in mind there are often alternate paths to consider that would cost you little and would make everyone happy.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In: a great book on negotiations, although my best learning was doing classroom role play.