Taste Note - Amazon Business Negotiating Best Sellers
Getting to Yes: Principled Negotiation for Contracts and Disputes
A Kurums Book Taste review of Getting to Yes for anyone negotiating contracts, settlements, and commercial terms.
Why this book fits Kurums
Use it to separate the people from the problem and negotiate on interests, objective criteria, and your BATNA.
For the Kurums Law audience the book remains the shared grammar of commercial negotiation: procurement teams, mediators, and counterparties all speak BATNA and objective criteria now - fluency is table stakes, and this is the original grammar book.
What the book argues
The Harvard Negotiation Project's method opens by rejecting the standard menu: soft bargaining (concede to preserve the relationship) loses shirts, hard bargaining (dig in, outlast) loses relationships and deals, and both share the same flaw - positional bargaining, where each stated position must be defended as ego. Principled negotiation changes the object: negotiate the problem, not the positions.
Four principles carry the method: separate the people from the problem (be soft on the people, hard on the merits; handle emotion explicitly rather than through the substance), focus on interests, not positions (behind incompatible positions sit multiple interests, some shared - the two sisters and the orange, one wanting juice, one wanting peel), invent options for mutual gain (separate inventing from deciding; broaden the pie before dividing it), and insist on objective criteria (market rates, precedent, expert opinion - standards that let both sides yield to principle rather than to pressure).
The armor chapters answer the obvious objection - what if they are more powerful, won't play, or play dirty? BATNA is the power analysis: your best alternative to a negotiated agreement is the true measure of your leverage, and improving it does more than any tactic at the table. Negotiation jujitsu handles refusers: don't push back on positions - ask for the reasoning behind them and invite criticism of yours. Tricky tactics get named and neutralized by negotiating the rules of the negotiation itself. The one-text procedure - a single draft iterated by both sides' criticism - remains the most underused tool in commercial dealmaking.
Key ideas, translated to your desk
Interests unlock what positions freeze
When two positions collide, list the interests behind both. Half the time they are compatible - the orange divides by juice and peel, not by halves.
Your BATNA is your leverage
Power at the table is what happens if you walk. Develop the alternative before the negotiation, and every threat aimed at you shrinks to scale.
Yield to principle, never to pressure
Anchor terms to market data, precedent, and independent standards. Standards let counterparts concede without humiliation - which is why they work.
Use it at work
- Require a BATNA memo - yours and your best estimate of theirs - before any significant negotiation.
- Open term discussions by agreeing the objective standards that will judge the terms.
- Run an inventing session with the counterparty before the deciding session - explicitly separated.
- Use the one-text procedure on your next multi-party deadlock and watch positions dissolve into comments.
Read it if
- You negotiate anything - contracts, disputes, budgets - and never read the source text.
- Your negotiations turn personal and deals die of ego.
- You want the foundation under Ury's Getting Past No and Shell's system.
You can skip it if
- You know the method cold; the value left is teaching vocabulary.
- You face genuinely zero-sum, one-shot bargaining - price-only deals blunt the method's edge.
- You want tactical scripts for hostile rooms; that is exactly what Getting Past No adds.
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