>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm delighted to
welcome William Ury to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Bill is here to discuss
his book Getting to Yes with Yourself, which is the prequel to his now classic Manual for
Negotiation. He is the cofounder of Harvard's program on negotiation and a world expert on
the subject. With former President Jimmy Carter he cofounded the International Negotiation
Network which is an NGO seeking to end civil wars around the world. More recently he
founded the Abraham Path Initiative which seeks to build bridges between cultures and faiths.
He has authored several bestsellers in addition to Getting to Yes, including The Power of the
Positive No. Please join me in giving him a warm welcome. [applause].
>> William Ury: It's a great pleasure to be here with you this afternoon here at Microsoft. I
want to talk to you about one of the most important competences that we, you as individuals
and as organizations and societies what I believe is one of the most important competences we
need in today's times and that's the competence of negotiation and of getting to yes. Getting
to yes I defined very broadly as the act of back and forth communication. You're trying to reach
agreement with the other side. You have some interest, perhaps, with which you hold in
common like an ongoing relationship and you have other interests with our intention. I've had
the privilege over the last 35 years of witnessing a revolution that is taking place around the
world that accompanies the knowledge revolution, the information revolution. That is a
revolution in the way in which individuals such as ourselves, organizations such as Microsoft,
the way in which we make decisions, because traditionally a generation or more ago most
places in the world the main way that decisions got made where the people on the top of the
pyramids of power gave the orders and the people on the bottom basically followed the orders.
Now, thanks to the knowledge revolution those pyramids of power are slowly flattening into
organizations that resemble more networks and as that happens the form of decision-making
shifts from vertical decision-making to horizontal decision-making, shared decision-making,
which is just another name for negotiation. Nowadays in order to get our jobs done, or even to
get decisions made at home or in the world at large with world problems, if we want to get
what we need we need to negotiate. Let me just if I may just illustrate that and actually invite
you to think about your own negotiating experience. If you think about who you negotiate with
in the course of your day and just the variety of situations that you might encounter, and don't
mind calling it out. Who do you find yourself negotiating with in the course of your day?
>>: Spouse.
>> William Ury: Your spouse. Okay. Who else, some of the tough negotiations? Who else do
you negotiate with in the course of your day?
>>: The boss.
>> William Ury: The boss.
>>: Coworkers.
>> William Ury: Your coworkers.
>>: Kids.
>> William Ury: Your kids.
>>: Policeman. [laughter].
>> William Ury: Policeman. [laughter]. Okay.
>>: There are a lot of fast cars in the parking lot.
>> William Ury: Right. I noticed [laughter]. Who else do you negotiate with? Anybody else?
>>: Customers.
>> William Ury: Customers for sure. If you think about it for a moment and you had to make a
ballpark estimate of how much it of your time you spend engaged, broadly speaking in the
process of getting to yes, negotiating with your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your boss,
your staff, your customers, policemen, what would you say it was, if you had to put a guess on
it? What percentage of your time do you spend probably speaking in that active back-and-forth
communication trying to reach agreement?
>>: Eighty.
>> William Ury: Eighty percent? Okay. How many would say it's at least a quarter of my time?
Okay. How many of you would say it's over half? Yeah. How many would say it's over 75 or
80? So whatever it is, we don't think of it as a negotiation in the formal sense of the term, but
in the informal sense it's a huge fraction of our time that we spend engaged in this process,
from the moment that we get up in the morning to the moment we go to bed at night. And let
me just ask you one question, one further question, which is if you think about the 10 most
important decisions you had to make over the last year, the ones that had the greatest effect
on the bottom line and your job and getting things working, the 10 most important decisions,
how many of them could you just make just purely by yourself? You're the boss and how many
of them did you actually have to reach with other people, in other words some shared process
of decision-making? The 10 most important decisions that you had to make in the last year,
and he have them in affected you need to negotiate? What would you say?
>>: All of them?
>> William Ury: All of them. And one other question about your experience. If you think about
the last 10 years of your work experience as you've kind of gotten more authority. You've risen
up in the organization. You have more power and so on, would you say that the amount of
negotiating that you are doing has stayed pretty much the same over the past 10 years? Has a
gone down maybe as you've gone up in the organization, or has it gone up?
>>: It's gone up.
>> William Ury: How many would say that it's gone up? That's what I'm talking about. That's
the negotiation revolution and that's going to intensify and we're the first generation to really
have to negotiate as much as we are and dealing often with people across cultures in all kinds
of ways and using technology, using the internet and so on there's so much room for innovation
here and it's necessary because to me there's really no problem in the world, really, that we
can't solve if only we can learn to collaborate, if only we can learn to get to yes, if only we can
learn to resolve our differences. It's a huge and innovative challenge that I think with the use of
technology, but with the kind of creativity that we've put into new technologies, if we can put it
into the soft technology of how human beings organizations, societies can learn to get to yes
even in challenging situations. I think you'll probably get more out of today's talk if you have in
mind at least one challenging negotiation that you're currently involved in. It could be at work
or it could be at home, just something that's giving you a little bit of problems. Does everyone
have anything in mind of some situation, difficult conversation, a tension, a conflict, a
negotiation? Everyone have a situation in mind? I'm sure you might even have more than one.
Let me ask you. There are two types of negotiations. There are the ones inside the
organization or inside the family if it's a personal situation, like for example your spouse and
kids, or inside the workplace with your boss or your coworkers or your colleagues. And then
there are the negotiations outside the organization, for example with customers or suppliers.
How many of you, out of curiosity, when I asked you for a challenging negotiation picked an
external negotiation, outside? Okay. How many of you picked an internal one? Okay.
Interesting. Of those two, which do you think, if you had to make a broad generalization, which
do you find more challenging, the external situations or the internal ones? How many would
say the external negotiations are what give me the most problems? Okay. How many would
say internal situations give me the most problems? Look at the hands go up here. That's
interesting. I find that to be true. Obviously, both can be very challenging, and in fact, external
negotiations often have an internal component that make them particularly challenging. But it
is kind of curious that the negotiations that we often find to be most challenging our people
with whom we are on the same team. We're in the same family. We have the same mission
objectives and so on. Those are often the most challenging. That leads me to my own
experience over the last 35 years. Roger Fisher and I collaborated on getting yes many, many
years ago and since then I've had occasion to work in all kinds of situations from business
disputes, boardroom battles, labor strikes, family feuds, civil wars around the world, you name
it. And people say I'd like to get to yes, but the problem is the other person. The problem is the
difficult people, that difficult organization. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with
someone who is absolutely rigid and stonewalls? How do you deal with someone who is not
willing to negotiate? How do you deal with someone who has more power than you? I've
written extensively and worked extensively on that. But over the years it gradually dawned on
me since my passion is really helping people and organizations and societies get to yes, I'm
always asking myself what stops us from getting to yes? What are the obstacles? It slowly
dawned on me that perhaps the biggest obstacle to us getting to yes, the yes's that we want, to
getting what we really want out of a negotiation or out of life generally is not the difficult
person on the other side of the table. However difficult they can sometimes be, the biggest
obstacle to us really is right here on this side of the table. It's us. It's the person we look at in
the mirror every morning and it may not be so curious because after all, if we experience
internal negotiations it's more difficult. What could be more internal than negotiation within
ourselves? Our biggest opponent might be that person, but that's also our biggest opportunity
if we can learn to turn that opponent into our own ally. That is really what I want to talk to you
about is that first and most important negotiation which starts within us, which I've found is
perhaps the most challenging negotiation for many of us, but it's also potentially the most
rewarding and it's often the key first step if we want to get to yes with others is to first get to
yes with ourselves. It's almost as if I realized we have been negotiating and I have been helping
people think about how we influence the other side and without really focusing on how we
influence ourselves. It's almost as if we have been negotiating with one arm tied behind our
back just by focusing externally when I think it benefits, particularly with the challenging
situations we have in our daily lives and in the world, we need all the help we can get. We need
to both harness the inner and the outer and so what I've learned is getting to yes starts off as
an inside job. That's what I'd like to focus on with you a little bit about is how do you get to yes
with yourself? What does that mean? How do you turn yourself from an opponent into an
ally? I'd like to talk to you about a few principles. Perhaps the biggest obstacle I find is what
makes us our own opponent is we human beings we tend to be reaction machines. We,
particularly under stress, particularly in conflict situations, we tend to react as Ambrose Bierce
once put it when angry you will make the best speech you will ever regret. [laughter]. That
happens, so it's almost as if there are three natural human reactions, particularly, in times of
conflict. One is we tend to accommodate. Out of fear we don't want to strain the relationship.
We don't want to lose the deal, whatever it is, we tend to accommodate; we give in. Another
reaction is perhaps out of anger and irritation is we go on the attack. That's the second one,
and the third one, particularly, I would say, and in internal conflicts, internal tensions like the
ones you raised your hand, the more challenging ones, we avoid. We don't talk about it. It's
just too difficult. It's too sensitive, so we don't talk about it. How many of you just out of
curiosity, if you had to diagnose your own style, your own negotiating style, how many of you
would say you have a tendency to accommodate? How many would say you sometimes have a
tendency to attack? Okay. How many of you would say you have a tendency to avoid? Okay.
Oftentimes, it's a combination of all three. In fact, we may accommodate for a while and then
we kind of say okay. That's it. And we go on the attack and then we realize, wait a minute. I
just damaged the relationship and so then we go back to avoidance. We go around a little bit
like a rat in a maze. And the question is how do we break out of that and how do we learn to
engage with our differences in a constructive way that meets our interests. It's not
accommodation. Is respectful towards the others, not attack, and actually addresses the issues,
and I think where that work begins is right here with us is in really understanding ourselves,
learning to work with ourselves, both so that gives us more satisfaction, but also so that it
makes us much more effective in getting along and dealing with others, particularly in
challenging situations. For me the foundation of being able to work with ourselves is the
ability, I like to use the metaphor of going to the balcony. It's almost as if you are negotiating
on a stage. Part of your mind goes to a mental or emotional balcony overlooking that stage.
It's a place of perspective. It's a place of calm. It's a place of clarity. It's a place of self-control.
It's a place where you can keep your eyes on the prize. These days it's harder and harder to go
to the balcony and to even stay on the balcony because there is so much going on for us. We
are living in much more stressful times, thanks to technology, thanks to cell phones and e-mails
and texts and tweets all flooding in all the time. So often you are sitting at your desk and you
get a message, an e-mail from someone, a coworker and you realize hey. I got left out of an
important decision and you feel irritated. You feel frustrated. How come they didn't consult
me? Naturally, the tendency is you compose a reply and you get that satisfaction of hitting the
reply button but you don't just hit the reply button, you hit the reply all button and it goes out
to the entire organization and you see conflict start to escalate. There's a little button on the
screen which is rarely used which is the one that says, which I think of as the balcony button.
It's the one that says save as draft. That's the one where you compose it. You save it as a draft
and everyone has our favorite techniques. You all have your favorite techniques for going to
the balcony. Some of you might go out and get a cup of coffee, go for a workout, go for a walk,
talk to your friends, sleep on it. Whatever you do, you're going to come back and look at that email from a place of perspective and you're going to ask yourself the important question. Is this
really going to advance the situation? Is this really going to advance my interests? And you will
probably answer no and you will hit the delete button and then you will pick up the phone and
call the person and get together with them if possible and try to resolve it in person in some
way. That's going to the balcony and I've found that in my own personal professional
experience, it's really my ability to cultivate. My ability to go to the balcony is increasingly
important. If I may just share one quick story from my own professional experience, some
years ago I was invited by President Carter to go to the country of Venezuela at a time when it
was highly polarized. There were a million people on the streets of Caracas, the capital,
demanding the resignation of the president Hugo Chavez and a million people on the streets
supporting him and there was some violence. There was some fear that it might even tip into a
civil war. Anyway, I spent the better part of a couple of years going back and forth. One
meeting in particular I remember that I had with President Chavez, I had a number of them, I
was at his palace. The meeting was for nine o'clock at night. He liked to work at night. I was
waiting there with my colleague Francisco and 10 o'clock went by, 11 o'clock, midnight we were
finally ushered in to see the president. He had his entire cabinet arrayed behind him and he
gave me a chair. He said so Bill, have a chair and tell me, give me your impressions. How are
things going here in Venezuela according to you? And I said well Mr. President, I've been
talking to some of your ministers. I've been talking to the political opposition and it seems to
me that there's some progress. As soon as he heard the word progress he got triggered. He
said what do you mean progress? Are you a fool? You're not naïve. You're not seeing those
dirty tricks those traders are up to? And he proceeded to lean very close into my face and yell
at me for approximately 30 minutes. [laughter]. If you put yourself in my shoes, I'm thinking
two years of work down the drain. I'm feeling kind of embarrassed in front of the whole
cabinet and everything like that as he is yelling at me, but somehow I remembered a friend of
mine had once told me, he said Bill, if you are in a tough situation remember to pinch the palm
of your hand. And I said why would I pinch the palm of my hand? And he said because that will
give you a momentary pain and it will keep you alert. For some reason I remembered to pinch
the palm of my hand just to remember to go to the balcony there and ask myself the question.
Is it really going to advance, I felt like defending myself, saying you're wrong. I'm not naïve, but
would it really advance the situation, the cause of peace for me to get into an argument with
the president of Venezuela? And so I determined the answer to that was no. So I was on the
balcony and I just listened to him and I just paid attention, listened to him from a balcony
perspective and sure enough, here was a man who could go on for eight hours with the speech
no problem at all. I'm sure if I had rebutted him everything would have gone south very fast.
But just by listening to him, I watched his body language, his shoulders kind of slowly sank and
after he said to me in a weary tone of voice, he said, so Bill, what should I do? Well that is the
sound of a human mind opening. Oftentimes we are dealing with people who are in an irate
state of mind. When people are in that state of mind they're not going to listen to reason. It's
like beating her head against the wall, but if you can just listen to them, use a psychological
method for a psychological problem, then suddenly there was a little bit of an opening. He
invited me. He said what should I do, so I said well Mr. President, if I were in your shoes I would
invite the entire country of Venezuela to go to the balcony. In other words, it was December
and I said last December the Christmas festivities were canceled because of the conflict. Why
not just give everyone, declare a truce and give everyone a chance to enjoy the holidays with
their families and when we come back then maybe everyone will be in a better mood to listen.
He said that's a great idea. I'm going to propose that in my next speech. His mood had
completely shifted. In fact, he said over Christmas I'm going to travel around the country and
I'd like you to come visit the country with me. You ought to see it. But then he thought for a
moment and he said you know, you're a neutral. You're a mediator. Maybe it wouldn't be so
good for you to be seen in my company all the time. And then he thought, that's no problem.
I'll give you a disguise. [laughter]. What I learned from that was that one of the greatest
powers that we have is the power of not to react. It's the power of going to the balcony here
and it's not so easy, of course, because there's a tendency for us to, as many people tell me, to
fall off the balcony. It's very easy in these reactive times to do that. So the question is how do
we stay on the balcony? Maybe when people ask me what's, of all the skills that you need in
negotiations, is there one that may be the most important? Usually I say it's this one. Usually I
say negotiation is an exercise in influence. You're trying to change the other side's mind.
You're trying to change their mind. How can you possibly change your mind if you don't know
where their mind is? Therefore, the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the other, to
understand their needs, how they see the situation, their perceptions is going to be critical if
you're going to try to change their mind. It's the ability to listen to them. But what I found is in
teaching this over many years is that it's not so easy for us to put ourselves in the other side's
shoes, particularly, in times of conflict. It's not easy at all for us to listen and what's in the way,
what is the obstacle is right here. It's us. It's in our own, all the thoughts and feelings that are
already occupying our minds. Basically, we don't have any space to take in the other side's
thoughts or feelings or how they see the situation. We're so focused on our problems we don't
have any kind of attention to focus on the other side's problems. I got enough problems. I
can't worry about their problems. Yet, only if you are dealing with your boss, for example, only
if you can help your boss solve their problems are they likely to be able to help you solve yours.
To me the key paradoxically, this psychological antecedent, the essential prerequisite before we
can put ourselves in the other side's shoes is to put ourselves in our own shoes. While that may
seem kind of strange, after all, we are already in our own shoes. What I find is that how many
of us can honestly say that we truly listen to ourselves in an empathetic way a little bit like a
good or trusted friend would? Usually what I find is if we look inside of ourselves there's a lot
of negative self talk often going on. Psychologists estimate that we have anywhere between 12
and 60,000 thoughts in the course of a day, maybe as high as 80 percent of them are negative.
They are kind of like that's wrong. That's not going to work. You're going to be a failure.
Whatever it is, it's almost like there's that inner critic always going on, that inner brain chatter
inside of us that we have internalized from childhood when we got all the criticism from our
parents or from our teachers, from others and so on. It's all there inside of us and there is a
saying that if we talked to our friends the way we talk to ourselves we wouldn't have any.
What's the alternative? The alternative is to learn to put ourselves in our own shoes to
observe, learn to observe from the balcony to cultivate our inner-scientist as it were. My PhD
originally is in anthropology and in anthropology the principal method of investigation is what's
called participant observation, and as you go into a foreign culture and you don't just observe
it, but you participant. You participate in the rituals in the daily life and that's how you come to
understand it. I think if we adopted that same method with ourselves, we participate in our
own lives but we also learn to observe ourselves to invoke our inner scientist and to listen to
ourselves like a good friend might, then we might be able to uncover what our real needs are,
because this is another thing I find in negotiation, another way in which we get in our own way.
We often don't know what we really want. Sometimes we're not even aware that we don't
know what we really want because we're focused on the position. I want that raise. But what's
behind the raise? Why do you want that? To ask those kinds of questions. To give you a
business example for a moment, about a year and a half ago I got an e-mail from a friend of
mine down in Brazil who is a leading business executive down there and she said can you help
my father? He is one of Brazil's big leading business leaders, entrepreneurs. He built up a
company that has 150,000 employees. It's Latin America's largest retailer and he has been
involved in this titanic battle with his business partner for the last three years. There our
arbitration suits, lawsuits, dozens of lawyers and probably a dozen law firms. It's all over the
papers. The Financial Times is calling it the biggest cross continental boardroom showdown in
recent history and can you help? I don't know if I can help, but at least I'll sit down and talk to
the guy. So I went to his home and listened to him and this dispute everyone thought was
never going to be resolved and he was slated to be chairman of the board for another eight
years and every board meeting was a battle. I asked him, Abelio, tell me, what do you want
here? What do you really want? I could tell, first of all, he was, should I fight? Should I
continue to fight because he felt very badly treated by his business partner? Should I find a way
out? He wasn't sure. I said what do you want here? And he said, we are often clear about
what we want. We can give people a laundry list of what we want, and he said okay. I want my
stock back at a certain price, a billion dollars or whatever it was. I want the elimination of the
non-compete clause, a three-year non-compete clause. I want some real estate. And he gave
me a list of things, but as I listened to it I thought that there has to be something behind this. I
said, Abelio, what do you really want? And this is the kind of probing that I think we could all
benefit from doing is to just probe what do we really want? After a while in the conversation
he finally said do you know what I really want? Freedom. That's what I want. I want my
freedom. And I said what would the freedom before? And he said the freedom to pursue the
business deals I want to do in life and freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most
important thing to me. He was 76 at the time. I said okay, Abelio, now that I understand that.
I was hearing the human being, not just the champion business leader. Once I understood that,
then it wasn't necessarily easy to deal with the other side, but this had been going on for 2 1/2
years, broken negotiations. When I sat down with the other side in Paris about a month later
on a Monday they said why are you here? I said I'll tell you why I'm here, because life is too
short. That's why I'm here. Life is too short for these titanic win lose battles where everyone
loses. And it wasn't just the parties losing. It was that the families were stressed out. 150,000
employees of the company had divided loyalties, even straining relations between, commercial
relations between Brazil and France. And he said so how would you settle it? I said if we could
just agree on two principles here, which are freedom for both individuals to get on with their
lives and dignity, I think that maybe we could have a crack at it. He said come by the office
tomorrow. We went by the office tomorrow. We just kind of outlined what would it mean to
apply those principles of freedom and dignity to the issues at stake here. That was a Tuesday.
By Friday we had both men sitting in an office, signing an agreement, shaking hands, press
conference wishing each other well and making a joint speech to the executives and to the
employees of the company and the whole thing was over. And it wasn't just a split the
difference compromise. It would've been kind of grudging for each site. Abelio said I've got
everything I wanted here and most importantly, I got my life back. And the other guy was also
very happy. To me the ability, where was the key? The key was it's not just about getting the
yes from the other. Abelio first needed to get to yes with himself before he could get to yes
with the other. It might be useful in your situation to ask yourself that same question. What's
the equivalent to freedom for you to see what do you most want or need in that situation?
What's truly important here? What's the real price? And then there was a question I asked
Abelio in that situation which was if you want freedom, ask yourself this question. Who can
give you the freedom, what you most want in life? Who can give you that freedom? Is it only
the other side, your business partner? Are you really just a hostage of the situation? Or at
least, to some extent, can you give yourself your own freedom? And that's this concept in
negotiation which turns out to be key here which is developing what we call your Batna. Batna
is an acronym in negotiation. It's always a good idea to have an idea of what your best
alternative to a negotiated agreement is. It's your best course of action if you cannot reach
agreement. In negotiation we tend to focus on just the agreement. We don't think about if for
some reason I'm unable to reach agreement with this person, is there an alternative way of
meeting my interests, because if we can figure that out, then it can give us confidence. It can
change the power balance a little bit in that negotiation and we're likely to negotiate more
effectively. In this case when I asked that question to Abelio he said okay. What did he go on
and do? He went on and said okay. I said independently, whether you reach agreement with
this business partner or not, what can you do to give yourself the freedom. He went ahead and
became chairman of another company. He went on a long vacation with his family. He
pursued other business deals and psychologically, paradoxically, by being less dependent on
settling this it was easier then to resolve the situation. I think all of us can do the same thing,
which is to think, for example, of what I call your inner background, which is your own
commitment to take care of yourself. In other words, what can you do to take care of your own
needs independent of that situation. Asking yourself who is responsible for meeting my needs,
what can I do to meet my needs independently of the other side? How can I take care of
myself? I think you can change the psychology of it and you can develop more confidence
because the best negotiations are when you care about situation but you don't care that much
about it, because if you care that much about it you're going to come with a lot of fear or
perhaps even a lot of anger or a combination of both which won't serve you that well. That
brings us to the next challenge, or maybe the key challenge in negotiation, which is how do you
change the game? What I'd like to do is just invite you to participate in a quick 15 second little
negotiation challenge for a moment just to illustrate this aspect of negotiation. If you wouldn't
mind turning to the person next to you and getting into kind of an arm wrestling position, just
arm wrestling. Okay. Oftentimes, negotiation is a little bit like arm wrestling. As in real life, as
in business, you want to maximize your profit here. You want to maximize your number of
points. Let's imagine that every time you get the other person's arm down, you get a thousand
points. Get ready, get set go. [laughter]. I'm watching a learning experience going on here.
There's a fair number of us who start off zero zero. Maybe I didn't see it, maybe one was
stronger and maybe you got a thousand points but, very quickly, quite a few of you said wait a
minute. Trying to maximize my number of points, okay. I'll relax by arm. That's 1000 points for
you. You relax your arms and that's 1000 points for me and like a windshield wiper you're
going back-and-forth and pretty soon you're accumulating tens of thousands of points. To me,
what that illustrates is that we often approach negotiations or conflicts like it's an arm wrestle.
The underlying assumption, the underlying question is who's going to win this? Maybe the
greatest power we have as negotiators is the power to change that mindset, to change that
dynamic from an arm wrestle into a search for mutual gain where we can both, through
cooperation, both accumulate a lot of points. To me that's the greatest power, but I'm always
asking myself what makes that hard for us to do often in situations. What gets in the way?
What gets in the way, I find first is not just the difficult person. Of course they can be difficult,
but our own inner mindset around, we have certain assumptions about reality and the person
who really brought this to my attention was Albert Einstein who once asked in the wake of
World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons he asked this question, is the universe a
friendly place. This is the first and foremost question all people must answer for themselves.
Why would Einstein be concerned about this? Because his reasoning was this. Who knows if
the universe is a friendly place or not? But he said this is a choice. This is a basic decision. If
we choose to say that the universe is a friendly place, then, or let me say it this way. If we
choose to see the universe as an unfriendly place then what's likely to happen? We're going to
arm ourselves collectively, arm ourselves to the teeth and we're going to react at the first
provocation. Given the weapons of mass destruction newly at our disposal, we are likely to
destroy ourselves and everyone else. If, however, we can answer that question as yes, the
universe is a friendly place, we're more likely to treat implacable enemies as potential partners
or others as potential partners. We're more likely to cooperate and we're more likely to get
together even in very difficult situations. What he defined is it's a choice. And this goes to one
of the great powers we have as negotiators which is the power to reframe. It's one of our
greatest powers, to reframe our own picture, our own mindset, our own assumptions either as
scarcity, basically a zero-sum game. Resources are highly scarce. It's a dog eat dog world or
possibly we redefine the zero-sum game as a positive sum game where there is enough for
everyone. So it's just, again, it's our own mindset. We can ask ourselves these questions, first
of all where does your satisfaction come from? Does it just come from outside, or to some
extent does it come from inside? Can you see that there might be enough to go around? Can
you see life? Can you see the universe is basically friendly? Can you see life on your side? And
if I may just kind of illustrate that very briefly with the personal story from my own family,
which is my own daughter, I've watched this over the last few years. She's now 16. Her name
is Gabi and when she was born, from the day she was born we discovered there were a lot of
congenital anomalies, structural anomalies for her and they required some 15 very major
surgeries over the years. But she reframes life. She doesn't see life as she's a victim of life or
that life is against us or against her. She basically finds a way to make every day count. For
example, she had her dreams. She wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.
When she was seven or eight she tried the longest hopscotch course in the driveway with a
piece of chalk. A year later she tried the most socks on one foot. Last year she told us for my
16th birthday for my birthday party I'm going to break the Guinness Book of World Records and
we said what record are you going to go for this time? And she said I'm going to go for the
longest abdominal plank. You know the abdominal plank exercise? You know, where you lie
down and you put your elbows down and you try to hold your body straight. I don't know how
long you can do it for, but I can do it for about a minute or two. She wrote to the Guinness
Book of World Records and the record was 43 minutes for women. She started training and a
week before her birthday she got a message from the current world record holder saying, in
fact, she had beaten her own record and she was just submitting it again to the Guinness Book
of World Records. It was now an hour and 5 minutes. Anyway, her birthday came and her
birthday party and all of the guests were there and we had to bring in the video cameras and
independent witnesses and so on just in case she broke the record so we could submit the
evidence to the Guinness Book of World Records. By golly if Gabi didn't go for an hour and 20
minutes. The next week she was on Good Morning America and if you look in the Guinness
Book of World Records 2015 you'll find her in there. [applause]. To me, that's just kind of an
example of someone who is very close to home is able to get to yes for their self and in doing so
she was also able to help others too because she used it to raise money for the hospital where
she'd had all the surgeries. Using the internet and setting up a little website she raised a think
$58,000 for Children's Hospital in Colorado. To me, it's basically if we can go to the balcony, put
ourselves in our own shoes, develop our own inner Batna, reframe our picture, then like Gabi,
you know, athletes or artists talk about the zone. It's this kind of state of peak performance
and peak satisfaction. We can stay in the zone when it comes to negotiating and dealing with
others which allows us to break one of the great traps of conflict which is when the other side
rejects us, we tend to reject them. When they disrespect us we tend to disrespect them. If we
can learn to respect the other side even if at first they disrespect us, we have a chance to
change that. A great example of that is Martin Luther King or Gandhi who were able to respect
for their adversary and somehow change that dynamic, which then allows us to get into a
cooperative cycle of giving and receiving rather than just taking which just shuts it down. The
key to the negotiation with my friend Abelio, the Brazilian was they were just focused on what
they could take from the other, but once we focused on what they could give, they could give
freedom and dignity to the other, then we created a positive cycle where they were able to get
to a yes. What that brings us to is we start with an inner yes which brings us to an outer yes
and then it brings about three possible wins for us, which is a win inside of us of greater
satisfaction that we get to yes with ourselves. But it also brings a mutual gain solution or the
other so-called win-win, but it also engenders a more generous perspective which allows us to
bring about a win, not just for ourselves and the other, but for the family, the workplace, the
community and ultimately for the world. Let me just leave you with one last story before we
turn to questions, which is, I'm just headed off to the Middle East and a couple of weeks. I'm
reminded of one of my favorite negotiating stories in the Middle East was an inheritance
dispute between three sons who received from their father and inheritance of 17 camels. The
first sudden, unique the older one received half. The middle son received a third and the
youngest son received a ninth. The three sons fall to negotiating about their inheritance and
each one once more because 17 doesn't divide by two and it doesn't divide by three and it
doesn't divide by nine and they get into a quarrel. Brotherly relations get strange, so finally in
desperation they go and they consult the wise woman about their problem and she thinks
about it for a while and she says I don't know if I can help you, but at least if you want you can
have my camel. They say fine. So then they have 18 camels. Eighteen does divide by two, so
the first son takes half. Half of 18 is nine, and 18 does divide by three and a third of 18 is six.
The second son takes his six and the youngest son takes his ninth and a ninth of 18 is two. You
add nine and six you get 15+2 is 17 and so they have one camel leftover. [laughter]. They give
it back to the wise woman. [laughter]. If you think about that problem for a long time I think
you'll find that a lot of our negotiations are a little bit like those 17 camels. There is no way to
divide it up. It is too difficult. Somehow what we need to do is take a step back to the balcony
like that wise woman, reframe the situation, change our assumptions and look for an 18th
camel. And my proposition to us is that the 18th camel may in fact be us. That's the 18th
camel. I want to wish you all of the best in getting to yes with yourself in order then that we
can get to yes with others. Thank you very much. [applause]. I'm all ears for any questions you
might have. Anybody, yes please?
>>: I'm interested if in doing this work you have found a sense of compassion has arisen in
yourself, and how important do you think that is to the process of getting to an agreement?
>> William Ury: Everyone can hear that question or should I repeat it? The question was have I
found that in doing this work that a greater sense of compassion has arisen within myself, and
then the follow-up was how important compassion is? That's a really good question and I don't
think I've gotten that question before. I would say if I had to say so I would say yes, because
essentially, I work in a whole variety of situations where in order to influence I have to put
myself in someone else's shoes and therefore have to show empathy, compassion. When you
put yourself, when we go through that exercise of putting ourselves into someone else's shoes,
more remarkable things happen. I'll give you just example if I may. I've been working in a
number of conflicts around the world, but on conflict that is the terrible and tragic civil war
that's going on right now in Syria. A couple of colleagues and I decided that as a first step we
would try to listen to the parties and try to figure out what our their interests. What do they
want and how do they see the situation? We carried on a number of interviews and one set of
interviews was with Syrian rebel commanders and we went right to the Syrian border right on
the Turkish Syrian border. They basically stepped across the border and we went through these
in-depth interviews. One of them, I remember the very last one we had in that session was a
young man, probably around 30 I would say, who was the exact stereotype in our Western
imagination of a terrorist. He looked like it. He had the thing, and a long beard. He was a
fundamentalist Muslim and whatever, so I could just watch my preconceptions. But then I
started asking him questions. He was a commander of like 2000 rebel fighters in the north of
Syria and I said how did you get involved in this? How did it all start? He said I was in
university. And I said what we you studying in university? He said I was studying poetry. I said
you were studying poetry? Yes, he said I'm a poet. I'm from a long line of poets and then he
declaimed some beautiful Arabic poetry for me, a little bit. And I said then how did you get
here? And he said I was arrested and I was tortured and a number of times my uncle also, and
that was how he got motivated. I was asking him different questions and I said let's imagine
that you survive this war, what do you want to do with your life? He said I've got my love.
She's in Egypt. I fell in love with a girl in Egypt and I'm hoping that if I survive we will be able to
get together. And then I asked him a question later on I said let's imagine your side wins this
war. What are you most concerned about for your country, for Syria? He said the thing I'm
most concerned about is the extremists. And I said you're concerned about the extremists?
And he said yeah. I happen to believe in Sharia law and Muslim law, but I don't believe that we
should just force it down people's throats if that's not what people want, but I'm afraid about
the people that do. Then the last thing I think I might have asked him was, any message you
want to send back to people in the West? And he said yeah, you watch this war maybe on your
TV screens and you see us just as numbers, but just remember that every number that you see
is a woman, child or man who has a soul. That was a three-hour interview, but you can imagine
at the end of the interview it was like you see someone as someone who is in the enemy
category but by putting yourself in their shoes you begin to understand and that's an example
of where compassion is key and empathy. There's a big difference, also, is that if you want to
change anyone or change any phenomenon you have to begin by understanding it and it
doesn't necessarily mean that you always agree with anyone or you agree with their behavior,
but the ability to understand and empathize turns out to be key to me. As a result of those
conversations to me one of the greatest gifts, or the greatest concessions you can make in
negotiation in terms of the cheapest concession you can make in negotiation is to simply give
someone respect, just to treat someone with dignity and you'll find that it costs you nothing,
but it actually means everything to them. There is another question? Yes, ma'am in the back?
>>: This is an online question. What about the situations where you just can't make any
headway but the stakes are super high and the example that Jeremy gave was negotiations that
occur between homeowners and creditors during the housing crisis.
>> William Ury: Should I repeat the question? How do you negotiate in situations where the
stakes are super high and you can't seem to make any headway, and as an example, the
negotiations between homeowners and creditors during the housing crisis. First of all, let's say
all of us probably face those kinds of situations from time to time where the stakes are very
high for us, personally. May not be Syria, but it's our own family or workplace and where things
don't seem to work well, which is why this is a challenge. To me this is one of the greatest
evolutionary challenges for humanity right now, for anyone right now for individuals and so on.
I think the first step in any situation like that first is obviously the foundation is you are going to
go to the balcony. From the balcony you are going to ask yourself what are your interests?
What do you really need in that situation? What's your Batna? We going to do it for some
reason you're not able to reach agreement? It's sort of interests and it gives you a sense of
confidence and power and then just analyze the situation and put yourself in their shoes,
understand, listen to where they are. The other thing to think about is that usually it's not just
a two-party negotiation. It's often like in this situation where there are many parties.
Sometimes you can involve third parties. It could be courts, lawyers, political figures,
neighbors, whatever it is to build kind of a coalition. You may not be strong enough to deal
with that situation, but you could build an alliance or coalition of people who can then deal
with a situation like that. All I can say is that in my 35 years of, I remember when I started
working in this field I focused a little bit more on, in the beginning at least, on international
negotiations in conflicts. But back in those days in the '70s we were working on like the Cold
War which everyone thought was absolutely intractable. There was no way the Cold War was
going to end. It was going to go on as long as we can. Then there was the war in South Africa.
That was going to be a bloodbath for as long as anyone could imagine. Northern Ireland,
Catholics and Protestants, that was a religious war and for hundreds of years and children were
being brought up just to kill each other and that was never going to end. There were others
too, but those I watched as patient, persistent negotiation combined with strategic nonviolent
action and various moves, leadership like Nelson Mandela. I watched as the Cold War shifted.
South Africa shifted. Northern Ireland shifted. One thing I would say is, one thing I've learned
from that is that sometimes we think it's about resolving a conflict, like peace just means no
conflict, but actually what I find is it's not so much that. It's not so much about conflict
resolution. It's about conflict transformation, because the conflict continues. The conflict
between the United States and Russia continued, but we're not thinking of thermonuclear war.
There's a conflict in South Africa; its continued. The conflict in Northern Ireland has continued,
but it's the form of conflict has transformed from destructive using war, violence and families,
in all the kinds of ways in which it can be destructive even verbally or physically or in the
workplace to constructive forms of conflict which include cooperation, but also constructive
confrontation engagement and using that. That's the aim. If you take that it's not to say that
you are you going to have immediate success in any situation with negotiation techniques, but
you'll bring analysis to it. You'll bring a power analysis and you can often, what I found is often
situations that seem totally intractable actually came yield over time patiently into solutions,
solutions that don't necessarily end the conflict altogether, but change the form of it. Yes
ma'am?
>>: You have a teenage daughter. I have a friend who has a teenage only daughter. She
doesn't want to finish high school or get her degree and they are in conflict all the time, all the
time. How do you deal with something that is so close? You talk to her about dealing with
yourself, but how do you deal with a child who is so, almost part of you? How do you step back
and negotiate. She needs to go two more years and she's not going to go to college.
>> William Ury: Listen, I know. I have a lot of friends facing those challenges, the same age.
They can be incredibly difficult situations, and this is one reason why I wrote this book about
getting the yes with yourself is I've found that it's very hard to influence your teenage daughter,
really hard. Hormones, I don't know what's going on, lots going on. The one place where you
have the most leverage is influencing yourself. If you can influence herself so that you're not
quite as reactive, so that from a balcony perspective you can watch it as a play and you can see
where you say as the parent, trigger your child and where your child triggers you. It takes two
to tango, but it takes only one to begin to change that situation. If you learn not to react. A
little bit like I learned with President Chavez yelling at me. Because people are going to behave
in all kinds of irrational and difficult ways, but we have a choice about how we choose, we can
choose to react or we can choose to respond proactively or we can choose to not react. Then
there's a chance to change the game and to think about your Batna. Maybe for the next two
years you may not have the very best relationship with your daughter, but can you have a live
and let live arrangement? I find that the works start really within ourselves because as parents
it can be very hard for us to let go of our children. We also, it's just intensely uncomfortable
not to have a good relationship with our child.
>>: She feels like she is ruining her life. It's done. It's over.
>> William Ury: Right. And it's not. You can go to the balcony and get that perspective. I think
first thing I would recommend you do for your friend is have her take care of herself. Yes
ma'am?
>>: I'm wondering if you think that to work on negotiation has anything to bring to the
prevention of interpersonal violence, like domestic violence and sexual assault?
>> William Ury: Sure. Does negotiation have anything to bring to the prevention of personal
violence like domestic violence and sexual assault. I'm just repeating it for those who may not
have heard it. I believe so very importantly, because if people can learn to negotiate for
themselves, part of negotiation is learning to assert what's important to you. Part of
negotiation, which is why I wrote the book just before getting to yes with yourself and others,
which you can find more information here, is the power of positive no. The ability to say no
and for women, in particular, I think the ability to say no and set boundaries and clear
boundaries and do that to me is absolutely key. Negotiation, the two keywords in negotiation
are yes and no. We're kind of socialized to it's almost like we have two arms, a yes arm and a
no arm and we're socialized to use the yes arm from the time we're little. We've been called
the age when children learned the word no. We called that the terrible twos. We stigmatized
the word no. But that's actually, development psychologists tell us is a really important age
when the child is learning to assert their own selves, to find their own identities and so on and
individuality. I would say that the ability to learn the negotiation, because often in those, often
that kind of violence is taking place within a very intimate context with the relationships and so
on, so the ability to renegotiate those relationships and at the same time to know your Batna
which might be to get help from external authorities and so on. If you need it, from the police,
from health. To me it is a kind of negotiation, but oftentimes people who are involved in those
situations, they want to find a way to continue the relationship in some way. Sometimes they
have to resort to their Batna, but to me negotiation and learning methods of negotiation of
self-assertion while understanding the other side turn out to be key.
>>: We have time for one more.
>> William Ury: One more, yes, sure.
>>: In your example from Einstein, a kind of speaks to the idea of framing the problem in the
environment, but in that vein currency negotiation is kind of one of the go to solutions
providing currency and interpersonal relationships or in dealing with others and those kinds of
things. Have you thought about the idea of currency as part of negotiation with oneself?
>> William Ury: What do you mean by currency?
>>: Not money, I mean there's always give and take. Have you earned those chips?
>> William Ury: Exactly. I think that's true. To me it's almost as if when we are negotiating
with people there is social capital. We basically make deposits. We have a goodwill and so in
negotiation every time you show respect to the other side you're making a deposit that you can
then draw upon. To me one of the models in negotiation is to be soft in dealing with the
people, hard in dealing with the problem. Why? Because so often in negotiation we either fall
into the problem of get the problem solved and so we ignore the person. We ignore the human
and the psychological elements and then we find that we are surprised when that person gets
angry and sabotages or spoils it. Or we make the opposite mistake of we want to be soft on the
person and so we end up being soft on the problem and making concessions and
accommodating. To me what you find successful negotiators do is it's almost like they draw a
line. They distinguish between the people and the problem so that simultaneously they can be
soft in dealing with people, make deposits of currency in that so that when it comes to dealing
with the problem they can deal with the problem on its own merits.
>>: Do you think that applies the same way when you are dealing with yourself?
>> William Ury: Absolutely. In other words, being respectful. It's interesting to me where does
respect for others come from? It's got to come from self-respect first and foremost. If we can
listen to ourselves, we can better listen to others. If we can make some deposits of currency in
our own, in other words if we can come from a place of self-sufficiency because we've taken
care of our own needs, paradoxically that's far from selfish. That actually makes us more able
to be generous with others. Oftentimes, what I find is we think we want to be kind to others
but we do it with a lot of self-sacrifice here and then it's artificial and strained. But if we learn
to, and this is what getting to yes with yourself is about, is if we can learn to take care of
ourselves and our own needs, does that make sense, we are going to be much more available
to others. That's the paradox. By getting to yes with ourselves, we're much better off at
getting to yes with others and creating a altruistic, generous environment for everyone. And if
you look, just as an example, people like I mentioned, King for example, he did a lot of work
inside of himself. If you watch that movie Selma he was negotiating with LBJ. He was carrying
on, but at the same time he was dealing with his own inner demons, his own inner doubts. He
was trying to get to yes with himself, trying to draw on his own inner resources so that he could
bring it to that negotiation. If you look, or take, I mentioned South Africa. Take someone like
Nelson Mandela as an example. In prison, when he was there in prison he said what he learned
was the art of observing himself, of observing his thoughts and feelings and becoming master of
himself because he was kind of reactive. He was kind of a boxer. He learned to master himself.
He learned not to blame just the other side but to take responsibility. He then by being able to
take care of himself, he learned the language of his adversaries, which was Africans. He studied
their history. He put themselves in his shoes. He had compassion for their history. When he
emerged from prison he was then able to engage with them, speak with them in their own
language, stand up for the rights of not just of his own people. He said I'm fighting for the
freedom of whites and blacks for all of South Africans and thus was able to respect them even if
it first they didn't respect him, get them involved in cooperation, forgive and basically as a
leader by drawing on his own inner resources able to help transform an entire society and
inspire the world in the process, by getting to yes with himself in prison, he was able to get to
yes with others. Thank you very much. [applause].