Attorney Roger Fisher served in World War II and later in the US government, where he helped negotiate a settlement to the Iran hostage crisis, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and peace agreements in several South American countries. He created the PBS public-affairs TV show The Advocates, wrote or co-wrote nearly a dozen books, and taught at his alma mater, Harvard University, where he co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, which produced Getting to YES and fundamentally changed the way negotiators do their work. Fisher died in 2012, but his work continues at Harvard and in the work of the many students he mentored.

Anthropologist William Ury graduated from Yale and got his PhD at Harvard, where he co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project with Roger Fisher. He has worked with the US government on nuclear disarmament and has mediated negotiations involving several international crisis hotspots. In addition to his work on Getting to YES, Ury also has authored or co-written several other books on dispute resolution, including the follow-up book Getting Past NO (1991). He spearheaded the reconstruction of the Abraham Path, the route taken across the Middle East by the patriarch of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Its purpose is to inspire a sense of commonality among the peoples of the region and the world.