Getting to Yes

Getting To Yes – Negotiating agreement without giving in

1. Don’t Bargain Over Positions

This first chapter of the book starts saying that any method of negotiation may be fairly judged by three criteria: it should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties.

Arguing over positions produces unwise agreements. As more attention is paid to positions, less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties, making the agreement become less likely. The result is frequently is an agreement less satisfactory to each side that it could have been.

Arguing over positions is inefficient. Bargaining over positions creates incentives that stall settlement.in positional bargaining you try to improve the chance that any settlement reached is favorable to you by starting with an extreme position, by stubbornly holding to it, by deceiving the other parts to your true views, and by making small concessions only as necessary to keep the negotiation going. The more extreme the opening positions and the smaller the concessions, the more time and effort it will take to discovery whether or not agreement is possible.

The last criteria that the book cited is that a negotiation it should improve or at least not damage relationship between parties. Arguing over positions endangers an ongoing relationship, because the task of jointly devising an acceptable solution tends to become a battle.

Otherwise, there is also the soft negotiation, where the standard moves are to make offers and concessions, to trust the other side, to be friendly, and to yield as necessary to avoid confrontation

A have been involve in those two ways of negotiation before, and actually, both were at negotiation class. The last activity that we did this week, the case of Harvard Business School, we had two different positions to negotiate, the buyer and the seller of a land...