Getting to Yes

Yeah.

Who wrote the book, Getting to Yes.

And, you know, taking the boy out of Kai Tai, and then I eventually washed up in Wellington, and an opportunity to wake up one day, and you're studying in Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School, and trotting off to the MIT and various other...

Has Trump renamed that one after himself yet? Well, fortunately, I was there before the blizzard of uncertainty struck all these universities.

And we very much learned about the Harvard-based negotiation model, which is interest-based.

I remember reading the book, Getting to Yes.

Roger Fisher, wow, it's a blast from the past.

But I love that you talk about how AI empowers and in a way empowers is a tool for better negotiation outcomes.

The third thing is know your BATNA.

A guy named Roger Fisher wrote a book called Getting to Yes, incredible book on negotiation, and he talks about a BATNA, your best alternative to negotiated agreement.

Before you get into any negotiation, you need to sit down with your team, with yourself, reflect, and say, hey, what's our BATNA? What's the number, what's the lowest number we're willing to accept to make this deal happen? And with that, what are the terms that we should look at or review to ensure that we're on the same page? But having that BATNA will help you decide what's the number that you may go back and kind of counter with, or what are some of the terms that are gonna be involved? Whatever it is, understanding your best alternative to negotiate agreement when you're gonna walk away is a critical step.

It's really the third in the five strategies.

And to really wrap our heads around this danger, we need to look at a foundational principle of negotiation.

There is this famous book by Roger Fisher and William Urie called Getting to Yes.

Oh, a classic.

Yeah, absolute classic.

Yeah.

And again, when I was reading this, and I think he mentions this book in there, there is this book, it's called Getting to Yes.

And it's from the Harvard Negotiation Project.

And it really, this win-win concept is not this kind of superficial marketing tool.

And the solution you're going to come to is going to be much more enduring, much more affirming and likely going to be a better solution for everybody.

So I just loved how he talked about this.

And I do think it really ties into that getting to yes, that principled centered negotiation technique that we all talk about.

Yeah, he talked about, I think one of the examples he used was a retail example where this manager would go and make more commissions because he would stand at the register so everyone else would do the work, and he would make all the money, and the other people weren't very happy about that.

What separates interest-based negotiation from conversation focused mainly on demands, positions, and fixed outcomes?

So one of the easiest ways to explain, I take a story from the book Getting to Yes, which was written by some professors from Harvard's program on negotiation, is if we were to take a couple of individuals in a library and one wants a window to be open and the other one wants it to be closed.

And these two individuals are fighting about it.

The librarian comes in and, of course, tells them to shh.

BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.

Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor, and William Urey, an anthropologist and negotiation expert, developed and popularized the concept through the Harvard Negotiation Project and their book Getting to Yes.

Bruce Patton, another Harvard Negotiation Project scholar, joined them on later editions.

At its simplest, your BATNA is what you will actually do if you don't reach an agreement with the person sitting across from you.

Let's compare them.

And there's also status quo bias, documented by economists William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, which is the tendency to disproportionately stick to an existing state or previous decision.

Their work pointed out that unlike the tidy choices in economics textbooks, Real decisions usually include a status quo alternative, doing nothing or continuing what we're already doing, and people disproportionately choose it.

Sometimes our BATNA is the status quo, and sometimes we undervalue it because a new opportunity feels exciting.

But I think there's a principle underpinning this idea of conflict and fighting fear that is helpful regardless of the context.

And I got this from the book Getting to Yes from Fisher and Uri.

And some of you business majors will probably know it.

So it's a negotiation thing.

Well, maybe we're not, but we pretend to be.

We think it's inappropriate to talk about in church.

Why? Why on earth would we be scared to talk about it? There's an entire book of the Bible dedicated to it.

The Bible's not scared.

I mean, it, th- I think we, we all need some kind of a muse to help us sort through when this happens because it's often not the other person.

William Ury, uh, said once, uh, of Getting to Yes, he said, uh, "In, in any conflict that I'm in, the most difficult person is the one in the mirror." So sometimes it's not the person across from us, it's how we're interpreting it and how we're feeling it because of everything, the story we're telling ourselves, and all the things that our brain does, and that we take in negative more than positive, and that's because we're filtering out what could be dangerous.

And oh, by the way, I think the amazing part of this is that our brain reacts to an insult with the same- ... strength, the same urgency as it would a threat to our lives.

You know? So I was told in this phrasing, which is pretty strong, literally our brain responds to feeling, uh, insulted or shamed with the same intensity it would as if someone held a gun to us.

So you mentioned an iconic name a couple of minutes ago.

He is one of my favorite authors, William Ury.

He co-writ- he co-authored Getting to Yes with Roger Fisher, Getting Past No. Pos- my favorite book of his is the book Possible that he wrote just two years ago.

You studied with him for a couple of years.