ACT Book Club - Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Looking to strengthen your communication and negotiation skills in the year ahead? Join ACT’s final Book Club of the year and get a head start on your New Year’s goals with Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (By: Roger Fisher and William L. Ury) — the timeless guide to achieving successful outcomes without sacrificing relationships.

While we won’t have the authors with us, we’re excited to welcome Meg Merritt, a dynamic mobility expert who has used the principles in Getting to Yes and other negotiation strategies to advance her career and lead complex projects with confidence. Meg will share real-world insights on applying these lessons in TDM and beyond — and how building your negotiation toolkit can help you reach your professional and personal goals. Whether you’ve read the whole book or just want to join the conversation, come ready for an engaging, practical, and inspiring discussion with your ACT peers.

Meet the moderator

Lauren Mattern is the founder of Journey, a TDM-centric mobility planning firm that also has transit and engagement practices. She has been in the mobility planning industry for 17 years, and cut her teeth on parking policy as a core leader of the SFpark pilots in San Francisco, implementing Donald Shoup’s pricing ideas using new technologies.

She’s a longtime consultant leading cutting edge TDM work in the industry, including at the most recent Major League soccer stadium. She just returned from doing TDM work at Transport for London before starting Journey.

Meet Meg Merritt

Meg brings 20 years of experience managing complex projects that deliver transit and emerging mobility solutions to communities. With a background as both a transit planner and a Professor of Planning, she excels at the art of storytelling to garner project support. She specializes in planner-led engagement with a particular talent for explaining engineering concepts to the public and equally, helping technical practitioners reach solutions that reflect community priorities. Her project management style emphasizes building rapport, active listening, consensus-building, and leveraging the unique strengths of multidisciplinary teams.

Meg was recently nominated to the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Oversight and Project Selection (TOPS) Committee. She was named to Mass Transit Magazine’s “40 Under 40” in 2020 and hascontributed thought leadership to CityLab and The New York Times.