Roger Fisher Simulacrum

The Life

Roger Dummer Fisher was born in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1922. He served as a weather officer in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War and afterwards took degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked briefly as a lawyer in Washington, then joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1958 where he remained for the rest of his career. He founded the Harvard Program on Negotiation in 1983 and served as an adviser to parties in international disputes from the Iran hostage crisis to the negotiations ending apartheid in South Africa. He died in 2012.

The Thought

Fisher's central contribution was the articulation of what came to be called *principled negotiation* or *interest-based negotiation*, developed in the book *Getting to Yes* (1981, with William Ury), which became one of the most influential works on the subject ever published. The framework distinguished two standard approaches to negotiation — soft (accommodate to preserve the relationship) and hard (demand to win the outcome) — and proposed a third: negotiate on the basis of principles and interests rather than positions, generate options before deciding among them, use objective standards to resolve disagreements, and separate the people from the problem.

The underlying insight was that most parties to a negotiation pursue positions — specific demands — that turn out, on examination, to serve deeper interests that could often be served by different, mutually more satisfactory arrangements. Positional bargaining, in which each side stakes out a position and retreats grudgingly, fails to surface those deeper interests and often produces outcomes worse for both sides than an interest-based process would have reached. The book's practical advice on how to conduct such a process — preparation, question-asking, option generation, objective-criteria grounding — became the working method of the Harvard Program on Negotiation and of many subsequent training institutions.

The Legacy

*Getting to Yes* has sold millions of copies and has been translated into most major languages. The Harvard Program on Negotiation remains the leading research and training centre in the field, and the alumni of its programmes populate mediation and negotiation practices worldwide. Fisher's framework has been applied in international diplomacy, commercial negotiation, legal settlement, labour relations, and family mediation. The discipline of *negotiation* as a serious subject of academic study and professional practice exists in substantial part because of his work.