Getting to Yes

I've just finished a much-recommended book, Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton of the Harvard Negotiation Project. It turns out to be as good as expected, which is fantastic, since expectations were suitably high. I've previously read Difficult Conversations, another HNP book, and found it similarly valuable.

For those that haven't read the book, it lays out a method of what they call "principled negotiation." This is an alternative to the classic "positional negotiation" that's little more than starting at two extremes and haggling to some center point with little regard for what makes sense. They also point out that positional negotiation can also be less adverserial, although possibly just as destructive, when one or both negotiators are falling over each other to make concessions in the interests of protecting the relationship, such as when a boyfriend "gives in" to his girlfriend, despite what he really wants.

The authors cover four basic aspects to the method then relate how to use the method even if others in the negotiation aren't. As with Difficult Conversations, they include plenty of examples and one of the impressive aspects is that those examples range from a husband and a wife figuring out a floor plan for a custom home to the Camp David Accords.

Like many of the best books in the self-improvement and business categories, much of what's in the book will be familiar. ("I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves." - E M Forster)

We've all negotiated with others many, many times and had varying levels of success. The successful negotiations often included inadvertent or instinctive reliance on some aspects of these methods. But the complete method described in Getting to Yes brings it all together, explaining why some negotiations have failed and how others could have gone better.

In just the last few days, I've already had several opportunities to start practicing the techniques from figuring out what to have for dinner to improving the possibilities for two deals that my company is seeking to make with other companies - one as a vendor, one as a customer. As such, I can't help but pile on the bandwagon and recommend this book as what ought to be required reading. If you haven't read it, you need to, and not just for work. If you have kids, you need to get them to read it, too, as I think it will be one of those things that prepares them for adulthood more than anything they will learn in school.

Wikis

Trevor clued me in to using a wiki for managing things like specifications at work. That's the collaborative software behind sites like Wikipedia. His team at work uses one (and it he talks about it a bit on his blog.) I'd pushed for one for specifications on my team at Microsoft and met with enormous resistance. We'd been using FlexWiki, a system built on ASP.NET by some Microsoft people, but open source. It was amazing to me that my team at Microsoft, intent on designing a website designed for community building, was resistant to a wiki and preferred Word documents posted on a SharePoint server.

I've been toying with the idea of taking my miniature wargaming system (The WarEngine) and putting it into an open source environment via a wiki. I'd tried starting on that using FlexWiki, but wasn't really all that satisfied with the experience. The reason for doing this is that there are fans of the system still actively playing it some five to six years after I'd left the business who want a new edition, but I've finally confessed to myself that it's unlikely I'll ever do it. This would put it in their hands. If I host it and include some advertising, perhaps I can even generate a little revenue while still doing right by the fans.

In a kind of trial of this concept, I've set up a wiki site (that I will leave undisclosed for the moment, since I want to get the very basics fleshed out before I make it too public) using MediaWiki, which is the same software behind Wikipedia. It's probably total overkill for the WarEngine and I do feel a little weird using software based on PHP and MySQL, but then it seems like the best tool for the job, and after all, I still use a Palm-based Treo rather than a Smartphone.

The site for it is coming together really nicely and I'm finding the experience of contributing to the wiki rather compelling in and of itself. I'm looking forward to sharing the site with the fans within a week or so. And in the meantime, I've contributed my first edits to Wikipedia, too.