Author
Roger Fisher
The Harvard law professor who turned negotiation from a contest of wills into a method.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Roger Fisher taught at Harvard Law School for decades and founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, the research program from which Getting to Yes emerged in 1981, written with William Ury. His career ran from wartime service and postwar law practice to advising on international conflicts, and the book was his attempt to write down what actually worked across all of them.
Getting to Yes gave the field its vocabulary: separating the people from the problem, focusing on interests rather than positions, inventing options for mutual gain, insisting on objective criteria, and the BATNA. Four decades on, most negotiation teaching still starts from it, including the courses that argue with it. Fisher died in 2012.
The signature
Fisher's signature is the belief that a negotiation can be judged by the quality of the agreement and the state of the relationship afterwards, not by who gave in. He is relentlessly practical and unusually decent: the method assumes the other side is a person with interests, not an obstacle, and it works precisely because that assumption is usually true.