Getting to Yes: Why Roger Fisher Tore His Own Negotiation Book in Half

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Getting to Yes, the 1981 book by Roger Fisher and William Ury, later joined by Bruce Patton, came out of the Harvard Negotiation Project and sold more than 15 million copies. It set out to replace positional bargaining, the flea market haggling where each side defends a stance and every concession feels like defeat, with principled negotiation. Its four pillars are to separate the people from the problem, focus on interests rather than positions, invent options for mutual gain, and insist on objective criteria. The authors illustrate interests with the 1978 dispute between Israel and Egypt over the Sinai, where Israel's need for security and Egypt's need for sovereignty were met by returning the land demilitarized, leading to the 1979 peace treaty.

The book also offers tools for hard cases: BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, for weaker parties; negotiation jiu-jitsu against hardball tactics; the one-text procedure, used by the United States at Camp David, in which a mediator revises a single draft; and naming dirty tricks, with Chamberlain's 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler as a cautionary tale. Critics pushed back hard. Law professor James J. White said it ignores zero-sum distributive bargaining, which prompted Fisher to tear the book in half before his class. William McCarthy, Justine Kirby, cross-cultural researchers and Forbes raised further objections, and former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss said its win-win approach fails in cases like the 1993 Waco siege.

• The book uses the Jack Sprat nursery rhyme to show that different interests can make a deal work.
• The one-text procedure sidesteps authorship bias, the instinct to reject an idea because the other side proposed it.
• By 1987 US school districts were teaching its concepts, and Florida Blue used them to form joint ventures with Humana.
• Kirby argued that treating emotion as separate from substance reflects a Western male perspective.
• Researchers warned that negotiators using the 36 stratagems can exploit the transparency the book recommends.