Something to readCompensation
Getting to Yes
A short book on negotiating for what you need without damaging the relationship
Why it’s worth your time
Getting to Yes can help most in a negotiation where you'll keep working with the other person afterwards, which covers a lot of negotiating at work. The method fits on one page, so you can sketch it before a raise, an offer or a fight over scope.
Preparing for a negotiation at work
The book · About 4 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read for the four parts of the method.
Watch for the four elements: separating the people from the problem, focusing on interests instead of positions, inventing options for mutual gain, and insisting on objective criteria. Then look for the idea of a fallback: what you'll do if this deal doesn't happen.
- Write your ask, your reasons and your fallback.
Before your next raise, offer or scope conversation, write three lines: what you're asking for, why you want it, and what you'll do if you can't agree. Then guess the same three for the other side.
Good moments for this: the night before a raise conversationwhen a scope fight keeps coming backbefore agreeing to a deadline you doubt
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
With your manager, it can help to name the problem you share out loud, such as keeping a project on track or a role filled, so the talk is about that more than about the two of you.
What might make this harder
Ask what the number is based on, and offer a standard you'd both accept, such as published pay data for the role. A position with a reason behind it can be negotiated; one without may mean leaning on your fallback.
Questions people ask
What is Getting to Yes about?
A 1981 book by Roger Fisher and William Ury, later revised with Bruce Patton, setting out principled negotiation: deal with the relationship apart from the substance, look past positions to interests, invent options for mutual gain, and insist on objective criteria. It grew out of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
What does BATNA stand for?
Best alternative to a negotiated agreement: what you'll do if this negotiation doesn't end in a deal. The idea was introduced in Getting to Yes.
How do I use Getting to Yes in a salary negotiation?
Work out what you need from the job beyond the number, ask what the employer is trying to solve, use outside pay data as a shared standard, and know what you'll do if the offer doesn't move.
What it says, and how it holds up
More than forty years on, Getting to Yes is still where a lot of negotiation teaching starts, and it's short enough for a weekend. Fisher and Ury wrote it at the Harvard Negotiation Project, and Bruce Patton joined them for later editions. Its central move is asking why someone wants what they're asking for, since the reason is often easier to satisfy than the demand.
At work, a manager's no to a raise may be protecting a budget cycle, and a peer's hard deadline may be covering a promise to their own boss. Reasons like those leave room the opening positions don't. The book's fallback idea, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, deserves a hard look: in an article for Harvard's Program on Negotiation, which Ury co-founded, Guhan Subramanian warns that an alternative can look stronger than it is until you compare it on equal terms.
James J. White, a Michigan law professor, reviewed the first edition in 1984 and found it often helpful but frequently naive, arguing that the authors seemed to deny a significant part of how negotiation works and oversimplified or explained away many of its hardest problems. A raise inside a set budget can be one of the negotiations that really is about dividing a fixed amount. Chris Voss, the former FBI hostage negotiator, pushes back from another side in Never Split the Difference (2016), arguing that the method expects people to be more rational than they tend to be in the moment.
If the disagreement is about whether something is safe, honest or fair to someone else, inventing options and trading interests can be the wrong instinct; a concern like that tends to need raising plainly, not bargaining over.
Other perspectives
Different takes on the same question. You don't have to pick a side.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.