Donald Trump, the Lose-Lose Negotiator
Consulting the classic text on “win-win” negotiation to see what a better trade policy might look like.
No.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s approach to negotiations, on trade in particular, has had me scratching my head a lot lately. In an attempt to understand it and its likely consequences better, I finally sat down this week and read the classic 1980s book on deal-making.
No, not 1987’s “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” I mean “Getting to Yes,” the 1981 guide to “win-win” negotiation by Roger Fisher and William Ury that was still hitting business bestseller lists in the 1990s and 2000s and came out in a third edition in 2011. The book was a product of the Harvard Negotiation Project that law professor Fisher, anthropologist Ury and then-just-out-of-college Bruce Patton — whose name was added to the cover for the second edition in 1991 — had founded in 1979 as an interdisciplinary effort to improve the theory and practice of negotiation.1