Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate

In Getting to Yes, renowned educator and negotiator Roger Fisher presented a universally applicable method for effectively negotiating personal and professional disputes. Building on his work as director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Fisher now teams with Harvard psychologist Daniel Shapiro, an expert on the emotional dimension of negotiation. In Beyond Reason, they show readers how to use emotions to turn a disagreement-big or small, professional or personal-into an opportunity for mutual gain.

Whether you are negotiating a business contract or curfew with your teenager, emotions can get you in trouble. They also can help you get what you want. This book shows you how. Telling a negotiator “Don’t get emotional” is nonsense. We all have emotions of some kind—all the time—and these emotions deeply inform both what we want and how we go about getting it. In Getting to Yes, master negotiator Roger Fisher helped readers understand the mechanics of everyday agreements and how to reach them while preserving respect and self-worth. Now, in Beyond Reason, he and psychologist Daniel Shapiro share their expertise in understanding how emotions affect negotiations and, more importantly, how they can be used as a tool. Beyond Reason sheds light on five core emotional concerns we all feel during any interaction, whether between business partners or spouses. Do you feel unappreciated? Alone? Put down? Trivialized? Your autonomy impinged? Awareness of these “core concerns” gives you power. Fisher and Shapiro show you how to use them to generate positive emotions in others and in yourself, allowing you to set the emotional tone and to get what you each want more easily. You will even know what matters most to people before meeting them. Fresh, insightful, and engaging, Beyond Reason is sure to be viewed as Fisher’s most important work since Getting to Yes.

Publishers Weekly

Masters of diplomacy, Fisher and Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, build on Fisher's bestseller (he co-authored Getting to YES) with this instructive, clearly written book that addresses the emotions and relationships inevitably involved in negotiation. Identifying five core concerns that stimulate emotion-appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status and role-the authors explain how to control and leverage your own and others' emotions for better end-results. They enliven the book with detailed examples of commonly faced situations-from dealing with colleagues to understanding one's spouse-and with anecdotes of high-level negotiations regarding critical matters of state (e.g., Fisher's conversation with the head of Iran's Islamic Republican Party when U.S. embassy in Teheran was seized in 1979). Fisher and Shapiro play out each situation, often toward an unsatisfactory conclusion, and then carefully analyze the negotiation and rewind it according to their behavioral framework for more favorable resolutions. Take the initiative and understand the five core concerns, they suggest, offering practical advice on understanding another's point of view, building connections, joint brainstorming, tempering strong emotions and defining an empowering temporary role. Baffled spouses, struggling middle managers and heads of state might take a cue from the convincing strategy laid out by these savvy experts. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Roger Fisher is the Samuel Williston Professor Emeritus of Law at Harvard, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and founder of two consulting organizations.

Daniel Shapiro, associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, teaches at Harvard Law School and in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School.