MALE SPEAKER: OK, I
think we're ready to go, so good afternoon, everyone. It's another exciting
talk at Google. We're glad you could join us. Today we are hosting Bill Ury. He is the author of many
of the definitive works in the field of negotiation, the
co-author of "Getting to Yes, Getting Past No." The current book is "Getting
to Yes With Yourself." And the idea behind
it is to take the sort of personal
and introspective look as a means towards approaching
the negotiation table. So in many ways, this is
the prequel, the prelude, to his other works,
and it could even help foster the conditions
for world peace. Bill is also the co-founder
of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard University and
has a very distinguished international career on the
negotiation circuit as well. So without further
ado, please join me in welcoming him to Google. Thank you. WILLIAM URY: Well,
it's a great pleasure to be here speaking a Google. I have a great debt
to Google because I use Google every single day. And it makes my life a lot
easier, and some of my projects actually also benefit from
Google in the form of AdWords. So it's just a huge
pleasure to be here, and I really have
enjoyed the campus. What I want to talk
to you about is what I regard as perhaps the
most important competence that we need in today's
times, and that's the competence of
getting to yes. Aside from coding,
perhaps, getting to yes is a really important skill
for reaching agreements, for building healthy
relationships, for resolving disputes. And it is not always easy. I've had the privilege of
having a kind of a front seat for the last 30 or 35
years on a revolution that's taking place around
the world that accompanies the knowledge revolution,
accompanies the information revolution, accompanies
the internet. And that's a revolution in
the way in which individuals such as ourselves, organizations
such as yours, and societies make decisions. Because traditionally, a
generation or more ago, maybe, the preeminent
process for making decisions was the people on the top
of the pyramids of power, they give the orders. And the people on the
bottom follow the orders. But nowadays, thanks to
the knowledge revolution, those pyramids of
power are increasingly flattening themselves into
networks, organizations that resemble networks,
like Google, where the form of decision
making shifts from vertical to horizontal. And another name for horizontal
decision making is negotiation. And what I've also
seen is that when I started in this
area of negotiation, most people had a
notion of negotiation as being kind of who's
going to win this. And that's shifted over time,
as the logic has shifted to one into which can we
both satisfy our basic needs. Can we both win, as it were? Can we achieve, you know, a
classic, win-win solution. It's not always easy. Today, these days, conflict
is a growth industry. And if you look
around at the news, it seems like people
or just as often getting to no as they
are getting to yes. And so my question is, what
stops us from getting to yes? So what I'd like to
do if I may just begin is just to kind of draw
you out a little bit about your own experiences
as negotiators. Because like it or not,
we are all negotiators. If I were to define negotiation
very simply and very broadly as back-and-forth
communication, you're trying to reach some
kind of agreement. And you may have some interests
that you hold in common, like an ongoing relationship,
and you have other interests which are in tension,
like you would like to get more money for
your products and services. They would like
to give you less. Or, you know, you've
got the budget. You'd like a larger
slice of that budget. In that broad sense
of the term, who do you find yourself negotiating
with in the course of your day, would you say,
just to kind of see what the variety of
your situations are? Who do you negotiate with? Your kids, OK. That's not always so
easy to negotiate. So who else do you
negotiate besides your kids? Significant others, OK, so
some of the tough negotiations start at home. Who else do you negotiate with? Your teammates,
coworkers, who else? Yeah? Yourself-- on the one hand,
you want to push yourself. On the other side,
there's a part of you that feels tired and exhausted. OK, so there's this negotiation
inside of ourselves. So if you were to
just make a ballpark estimate of how
much of your time you spend engaged,
broadly speaking, in the act of back-and-forth
communication, trying to reach
agreement with your kids, your significant other, your
colleagues, your coworkers, your bosses, clients,
suppliers, yourself, what percentage of
your time do you think you spend engaged
in this process. If you had to take a
guess, what would you say? About half? OK, how many would
agree with that? It's about half. OK, how many would say
it's even more than half? OK, so whatever it is, that's
a huge chunk of our time. And we may not
always think of it in the formal sense
as negotiation, but in the broad
sense of the term, this is a process we're engaged
in from the moment we get up in the morning to the moment
we got to bed at night. So let me ask you a couple
other questions here. If you were to think
back over the last 10 years of your careers--
you've kind of risen up and you have more
authority and so on-- would you say
the amount of time that you spend negotiating has
stayed pretty much the same? Has it gone down over time? Or has it gone up? Up, how many would
say it's gone up? OK, that's a majority. So that's what I call this
negotiation revolution. There's a kind of a
negotiation revolution. I see it in every
country I visit. As the form of
decision making shifts, negotiations become--
the preeminent form for making decisions, not
just at work, but at home, in our communities, in politics,
in the world-- and the question is, how do we learn
to do it better? And my question is what
stops us from getting to yes? Let me ask you,
just for a moment, just to take one any situation
you'd like just to have in mind as we talk about this
subject of getting to yes for the next hour. Take any situation that
you'd like to focus on, some negotiation you're involved
in, could be with your child, it could be with your
significant other, it could be with a coworker. Just pick a situation, OK? Everyone pick a
situation, something that's been maybe a little
problematic for you, some negotiation
you're involved in. OK, everyone got one? So then let me ask you if there
are two kinds of negotiations. There are the external
negotiations that are outside, let's say, with customers,
with suppliers, you know, standardly what we talk
about as negotiation. And then there are the
negotiations inside, like inside the family
or inside your work unit. How many of you, just
out of curiosity, have just selected an
external negotiation? That was what came
to mind when you were thinking about
a problematic one. How about internal? OK, a lot of
internal-- and so if I ask you this question
of if you were to make a broad
generalization, just from your own experience, which
is more problematic for you-- the external negotiations
or the internal ones? Which ones tend to
give you more trouble? How many would say it's
external gives me more trouble? OK, how many would say it's
internal gives me more trouble? That's interesting. If you look around the
room, it's like 90%. Now obviously both
can be problematic. And in fact, a lot of
external negotiations have an internal component. But so my question is this. Because basically my passion
for the last 35 years has been helping
people, organizations, societies get to yes, from
family feuds to boardroom battles, from labor
strikes to civil wars in different parts of the world. And the thing that's
kind of struck me is that, actually, when
I think about what makes negotiations very difficult,
what I've gradually come to realize is that the
negotiation with ourselves-- you know, what could be more
internal than the negotiation with ourselves? Because it seems
like we experience internal negotiations
as more problematic, but perhaps the most problematic
is the one with ourselves. And this is what I've found
is that perhaps our biggest opponent, the biggest obstacle
to us getting what we want in life and in our
negotiations, is not what we often think it is. It's not just the other person
across on the other side of the table. That person can
be very difficult. Those people can
be very difficult. And I've specialized in
dealing with difficult people in difficult situations. But I find that however
difficult that person is, the most difficult
person we have to deal with is-- I have to deal with,
at least-- is right here. It's myself. We are, in some ways,
our own biggest opponent. That's the person we look at
in the mirror every morning. That's the person who's going
to give us the most trouble. I think it was President
Teddy Roosevelt who once said, if you could give
a kick in the pants to the person who will give
you the most trouble in life, you would not sit for a month. We are often our
own worst enemies because we human beings, for one
thing, we're reaction machines. We tend to react. We tend to react
in ways to do not serve our long-term interests. And so my question is, how
do we turn that biggest opponent of ours into
our biggest ally? That's what I think
of as the process of getting to yes with yourself. How do you turn your own
opponent, yourself as opponent, into an ally? It's not easy. And what I've found is
that what we tend to do is it's almost as if
we get in our own way. And it's almost as if
we've been negotiating. And the way I've tended to
focus on negotiation, always on the other side of the table. And I realize that
part the problem is on this side of the table. And it's almost as if we've been
negotiating with one arm tied behind our back because
we're negotiating just focused on the external,
influencing the other person, when in fact our
biggest opportunity is to start off by influencing
this person right here. And so what I'd like to do
with you for a moment is just-- from that realization,
I've kind of come to realize that getting
to yes is an inside job. And so what I'd like to do is
talk about how do we do that. How do we handle that first
and perhaps most important negotiation that
we ever engage in, the one that starts from within? What are some principles of how
do you get to yes with yourself as the first step towards
getting to yes with others? How do we do that
in our homework? And I know here-- I
just had the pleasure of spending several
hours with Meng, and I know you
have these courses about searching Inside yourself
and doing that work of self awareness and of attention
training and so on. So this will be very congruent
with that kind of work. What I'd like to do is
just review with you just a few principles. And then I'd like to leave
time for some questions, so we can go into any
of your situations or any questions you might
have about negotiation. But I'm going to go over
some principles that are the very same principles
we might apply outwards, but to apply them inwards first. I think of them as the
psychological antecedents to the process of
getting to yes. So the first, and
maybe the foundation, that I've been teaching for
many years around negotiation is the ability
to-- I like to use the metaphor of
going to the balcony. The balcony,
basically, it's almost like you're negotiating
up here on a stage. Part of your mind goes to a
mental or emotional balcony overlooking that stage, which
is 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, because so often,
we're reacting. We're often reacting
out of fear. We're reacting out of anger. And as the old saying
goes, when angry, you will make the best
speech you will ever regret. And we sometimes get brought
into a process of either attacking the other side
sometimes out of anger, or accommodating, giving in,
to the other side out of fear, or simply avoiding
conflict altogether. How many of you, just out of
curiosity, if I ever ask you-- I sometimes think of this as the
three A's-- you know, attack, accommodate, and avoid. If you said, I have a
tendency to accommodate, how many would say that you
have a tendency to accommodate? I would say you have a
tendency to attack more when you're in a conflict. How many would say you
have a tendency to avoid? OK, and sometimes we use a
combination of all of them. We may accommodate for a
long time with our child, and then we suddenly lose it. You've been to that
movie, you know? And then we attack, and
then we go back to avoiding. The question is, is
there a better way? And I think there
is a better way of getting to yes, which
is actually engaging the differences in
a constructive way. But in order to do
that, it requires us to go to the balcony. And it's hard to go to
the balcony these days. And particularly
today with everything, all our technology and cell
phones and texts and tweets and everything that's going on,
it's so easy to get reactive. I mean, for example, you're
sitting there at your computer and you get an email that you
suddenly felt, wait a minute. They didn't consult
me on that decision. And you kind of feel
ticked off and irritated. So it's just very natural
to compose a reply. You get that
instant satisfaction of hitting the Reply button. But you don't just
hit the Reply button, you hit the Reply All button. And then it goes out to
the entire organization and you start to see
conflicts start to escalate. There is a button on that
screen that is often rarely used that I think of as
the balcony button, and it says, Save as Draft. That's the one where you
get it out of your system. You save it as a draft. Then everyone has their
favorite techniques for going to the balcony. Some people might, you
know, breathe or meditate. Some people might go for a walk
in these lovely surroundings here or go have a cup of coffee
with a friend or sleep on it. But you're going to come
back after a few minutes or a few hours. You're going to
look at that email and you're going to ask
yourself the important question. Is this going to
advance my interests? Is this really going to serve
the needs of the situation? And most likely you're going
to hit the Delete button, and then you're going to pick up
the phone and call the person, get together with
them or however to try to resolve the situation. Because email as it turns
out, while it's a great way to convey information,
is not such a great way to deal with anything
that's emotionally delicate. So those are all ways
of going to the balcony. But the question
is, a lot of people find that they fall
off the balcony. We fall off the balcony. It's just natural. And so the question is how
can we say on the balcony? And so this brings me
to the next principle, which is one of the key
principles of negotiation. I mean, if people ask me,
what's the most important skill that a negotiator
needs to have-- there are a lot of skills
that we need to have, but if I had to pick one--
usually I pick this one. It's the ability to put yourself
in the other side's shoes, in other words, the ability
to try and understand what your coworker really
wants or what your child wants or what your
significant other wants. It's to listen to them. Because after all, negotiation
is an exercise in influence. You're trying to
change someone's mind. How can we possibly
change their mind if we don't know
where their mind is? So putting yourself
in their shoes is key. But what I've discovered
in teaching this over many, many years is that it's
not easy for people to put themselves in
the other side's shoes. It's not easy for us to listen
to others because there's so much going on for
us in our own minds already that there's no mental
or emotional space for us to be able to invite in the
other person's concerns. And so the biggest block to
us being able to put ourselves in the other side's
shoes-- which is key if you're dealing with
customers or clients or anything like that, it's absolutely key--
but the biggest block is us. And so what I
found paradoxically is that there is a psychological
antecedent to putting ourselves in the other person's
shoes, and that's to put ourselves in
our own shoes first. In other words, not
just to listen to them, but before we can
listen to them properly, we need to listen to ourselves. We need to be able to see
ourselves from the balcony. We need to be able to practice
the skills of self observation and watch what happens. I think it was Benjamin
Franklin who centuries ago said, observe all people,
yourself most of all. So what I'd like to do is
tell you a little story, just if I may, from
my own experience of when I began to really focus
on this whole issue of how do I negotiate with myself. I was involved some
years ago as a mediator in a conflict in Venezuela. I had been asked
by President Carter to be a third party in between
the government of Venezuela, the president whose name was
Hugo Chavez-- some of you may remember him-- and
the political opposition. And it was a time when there
were about a million people on the streets of
Caracas, the capital city, demanding the resignation of the
president and a million people on the streets supporting him. And there was some
violence, and people were genuinely afraid it
might lead to a civil war. Anyway, at one point-- I
had a number of meetings with President Chavez--
but one of them-- he was a kind of complex and
somewhat volatile individual-- but at one of them, we had
a meeting with my friend Francisco, colleague
Francisco, set at 9 o'clock. He liked to meet at night
in the presidential palace. And we waited patiently there. And finally midnight came
and we were ushered in to see the President. Instead of finding
him alone at midnight, we found his entire
cabinet arrayed behind him. And he said, so, Bill. He said, have a seat here. Now tell me what do you
think of the situation here? What's your impression? And I said, well, you
know, Mr. President, I've been talking to some of your
government ministers here and some of the opposition
and it seems to me you're making some progress. As soon as he heard the word
progress, he got triggered. He said, what do
you mean progress? Are you blind? You're not seeing
the dirty tricks those traitors in the
opposition are up to. And he proceeded to get furious,
leaned in very close to my face and started to yell for
approximately 30 minutes, in front of his entire cabinet. Now if you put yourself in my
shoes, I was kind of going, wait a minute. I'm not blind, you know. You're trying to defend yourself
and thinking about that. But then, thankfully,
I was able to go to the balcony for a
moment and ask myself the important question. Is it really going to advance
my cause, the cause of peace, for me to get into an
argument with the president of Venezuela? So I thought the better of it. I bit my tongue, and I
just listened to him. And sure enough,
he was a man who could go on for eight hours,
give a speech, no problem. If I had interrupted him
and tried to argue with him, I'm sure it could have
gone way off the tracks. And I was thinking in
myself, OK, two years of work here in Venezuela
all down the drain. You get reactive in
a situation like that when someone is shouting
at you like that. But somehow I was able
to go to the balcony, suspend my normal reaction. And I saw after 30 minutes,
by me not reacting, I saw his shoulders kind
of sink a little bit. And in a weary tone of
voice he said to me finally, so, Bill, what should I do? Well, that is the sound
of a human mind opening. When you try to deal
with someone who's in an angry state
of mind, they're not going to listen to reason. But at some point he
finally is saying, OK, so what should I do? He's willing to open, so
I said, Mr. president, I think the entire
country of Venezuela needs to go to the balcony. It's almost Christmas time. Last Christmas the
festivities were canceled because
of the conflict. Why not have a truce
and give everyone a chance to enjoy the
holidays with their families? And when we come
back in January, maybe everyone will
be in a better mood. And President Chavez
said, that's a great idea. I'm going to propose
that in my next speech. His mood had completely shifted. And then he said
to me, you know, over Christmas I'm going to
travel around the country. And I'd like you to come
with me and see the country. And then he thought for a moment
and he said, but wait a minute, you're neutral. Maybe it won't be
so good for you to be seen always in my company. He said, but that's no problem. I'll give you a disguise. Anyway, his mood had
completely shifted. Now why was that? Because in order for me to
put myself in his shoes, I first had been able to
put myself in my own shoes. Because when I
was waiting there, in those three hours that
I was waiting for him, I took some time just,
like, to meditate or just to be quiet by
myself, quiet my mind, listen, so that I
was less reactive. And even when it
was happening, then, from a balcony perspective
I could just watch. I could observe
my thoughts about, oh, all my work is
going down the drain. I could observe my emotions
of being embarrassed. I could observe my
physical sensations. And instead of
reacting to them, I could simply let them
pass so that I could then focus on President Chavez. So again, just a lesson to
me about how important it is to put yourself
in your own shoes before you try to put yourself
in the other person's shoes-- how important it is to
listen to yourself before you listen to others. And of course in doing
that, what you find is you can uncover
what are your deepest needs in this situation. What do you really want? Now that may seem
very obvious to us, but I can't tell you
how many times I've been involved in
situations-- whether it's family or work or
politics-- where people don't know that
they really want. We think we know what we
want, but we haven't really gone deep enough. And if I may, I'll just give
you just another example, just to kind of illustrate
that from a business context. About a year and a half ago,
I was contacted by a business leader that I knew
down in Brazil who wanted my help in
helping her father, who was one of Brazil's
leading businessmen. He had founded Brazil's
largest retailer, had 150,000 employees. And he was involved
in a gigantic conflict with his business
partner, who was French. And they had been
fighting each other in the courts for
2 and 1/2 years. It was all over the papers. The media called it perhaps
the largest boardroom cross-continental showdown
in recent history. And it was affecting everyone. It was not just
affecting the parties but their families, the 150,000
employees of the company that had divided loyalties and so on. And she asked me
if I could help. I didn't know if I
could help, but I agreed to sit down
with her father. And I sat down with him at his
home, and he told me the story. And it seemed to
me he was unclear. Did he want to fight? Or did he really
want to settle this? And I think he was torn inside
of himself, like many of us. We're torn. What exactly do we want most? Because he was
going to be chairman of the board for
another eight years. He was already 76,
until he was 84. So I asked him. I said, Abellio, tell me,
what do you want here? What do you really want? How can I help you? I mean, what is it
you really want? And he said, well, I want
my stock at a certain price. I want the elimination of
the non-compete clause. I want some real estate. He give me a list. But as I listened
to it, I said, no. But, Abellio, you're a man
who seems to have everything. You've got everything
you possibly want. You're a billionaire. I mean, what do you
really want here? And he finally
said, after I probed for awhile, he
finally said, freedom. That's what I want. I want my freedom. And then that's when I was
hearing the human being. And then I asked him, what
do you want the freedom for? And he said, well, I want
freedom to spend time with my family here, which
is the most important thing in my life. And I also want freedom to
pursue the business deals that I've always loved pursuing. So once we were clear about
what his underlying needs were, then the negotiation with the
other side became a lot easier. And even though it had gone
on for 2 and 1/2 years, negotiations had broken
down, it took my colleagues and I just four short
days from the time we had the first
meeting to the time we had both men sitting side
by side, signing an agreement, shaking hands, press conference,
joint press statement, wishing each other well,
making a joint presentation to the executives of the
company and to the employees of the company explaining it,
and moving on with their lives. And that just, again,
underscored for me how important it is to be
able to uncover your needs. So in your own situation, if
you think about it for a moment, it's just always
useful to ask what do I most want or need
here, behind what I think I need, behind the position,
the concrete thing? What's the equivalent of freedom
for you in that situation? What's truly important here? What's the real prize for you? In the negotiation
with your kid, what's really, truly
important here? What's the most
important thing for you? It's, again,
something that we may lose sight of when we get
involved in a conflict. And where that leads you
to, then the question is, where's the power going to
come from to meet your needs? Now in negotiation we have a
concept that Roger Fisher and I called in "Getting to
Yes" many years ago, we call it your BATNA. It's your Best Alternative
To a Negotiated Agreement. What are you going to do to
satisfy your interests if you cannot reach agreement? You know, what's your
walk-away alternative? What are you going to do? To have an alternative-- if
you don't have this one client, is there another client? It just gives you a
sense of-- I mean, to me, this is what the internet,
this is what Google does, is it gives people alternatives. Because in the old
days, when they didn't have much
information, you had to go just with one way. But now you can
Google and you can find other ways of doing it. So to me, in some ways,
you're the BATNA company. You help people. You give people BATNAs. Now what I've found,
though, interestingly in teaching this
is a lot of people, we don't naturally
think of our BATNA. We just focus on just
getting the agreement, not the alternative. And what's often
blocking us, I find, is there's an inner
psychological prerequisite to this, which is what you might
call your inner BATNA, which is your commitment to take
care of your own needs. If I go back to the
story of my friend Abellio for a moment in
the retailer in Brazil, when he told me
he wanted freedom, I asked him, OK,
Abellio, who can give you the freedom you most want? Who can give you the
freedom you most want? Is it only your arch enemy? Or to some extent, can you
give yourself that own freedom? Once he understood that, oh,
yeah, he could give himself a little bit, then
he said, OK, well, even without us reaching
agreement with the other side, what could he do? He could pursue
some business deals. He moved his office
out of the company. He became chairman
of another company. He spent time, took
holiday with this family. Psychologically, that
shifted the situation. Because he was no longer so
psychologically dependent on the other side, then it was
much easier to reach agreement. And so the question
again for us to ask ourselves is who in the end is
really responsible for meeting my needs in the situation? What can I do to meet my
needs independently, perhaps, of the other side? And how can I take
care of myself? What would that be for you? Which brings me, then, to where
does your satisfaction come from in negotiation
or in life generally? Let me just actually ask
you to do quick-- sometimes in negotiation we like
to use little exercises. I'd like to just invite
you to participate in a quick, 30-second exercise,
if you will, if you wouldn't mind, just totally
voluntary here. But if you wouldn't mind turning
to the person next to you and getting into arm
wrestling position with them, as if you were going
to arm wrestle. For those who want to
demonstrate this, OK? Yes. OK. As if you were going
to arm wrestle-- you can even
support your elbows. OK, here we go. So as in business, you want
to maximize your score here. Let's say you get
1,000 points every time you get the other
person's arm down. OK. Get ready. Get set. Go. You get the other
persons arm down. OK. What I see here is there's
a learning process, right? There's a learning process. And essentially there's
a learning process where-- it was like you
two gentlemen there. You start off zero-zero, right? And that's often how we do it. And then suddenly, you know,
if you were super strong, maybe you get the other
person's arm down once. But then it was like
a light bulb went on. And people said, wait a minute. If I get my arm down,
that's 1,000 points for you and 1,000 points for me
and 1,000 points for you and 1,000 for me, like
a windshield wiper. And suddenly you're accumulating
tens of thousands of points. Well, think about that. We often approach negotiation
like an arm wrestle. You know, who's
going to win this? But in fact, the
greatest power we have may be the power
to change the game, from an arm wrestle to a
search for mutual gain here. And the question for me
is, why is it so hard for us to do that? It's because there's a mindset. We often have a mindset
in mind that basically holds that this is, like,
a dog-eat-dog world. And it's a hostile world. And it's ranged against
me, and somehow its scarce. There's a mindset
of scarcity, which is why one of the greatest minds
of the last century, Albert Einstein, once
asked this question. He said, is the universe
a friendly place? This is the first and
most basic question all people must
answer for themselves. Now why would Einstein say that? Why would he ask that question? Because his reasoning was
in the wake of World War II and the advent of
nuclear weapons, he reasoned that if we
basically answer this question and say the universe is an
unfriendly place-- because after all, who knows--
but if we decide to choose the universe
as an unfriendly place, we're going to see
everyone as our adversary. And collectively we're
going to see other nations as our adversaries,
and we're going to react at the
first provocation. And undoubtedly, we're going
to end up in a nuclear war, and that will be end
of life on Earth. However, if we can choose
to answer the question as is the universe
a friendly place, we're more likely to treat
people as potential partners. And we're more
likely to cooperate. So he thought this was
the underlying question. In other words, this goes
to a negotiation technique which is that one of the
greatest powers we have is the ability to reframe. Take the same situation and
see it in different ways. You could frame the situation
as friendly-- life is basically on your side-- or you can
frame it as unfriendly. And that's basically our choice. That's basically our choice. And how we do that,
after all, depending on how we make that decision,
affects a lot of things for us. If I might just
use, for example, we could reframe the
picture as scarcity. Life is scarce, and so I'm
going to just grab mine. Or we can approach a situation
from a frame of sufficiency. Maybe there's enough for
both of us or for all of us. And the way in which we frame
that, the underlying mindset, the underlying assumptions
we bring to that situation will affect those things. So these are some of the
ways in which we can do this. But you can ask yourself,
for example, this question. Where does my
satisfaction come from? Is there enough? Can I see life on my side? In other words, just
question our assumptions and see if some of our beliefs,
in fact, are limiting beliefs. If I might just use an example
from my own personal life, one of the better examples of
this where I can learn this from is my own
daughter, who is 16. Her name is Gabby,
and she was born with a lot of
medical difficulties. She's had, like,
15 major surgeries on different parts of her
body, structural difficulties. But she somehow has a
positive attitude about life. She frames things
in a different way. She doesn't feel
sorry for herself. She develops her
own inner BATNA. And one of her dreams
from when she was little was she always wanted
to be in the "Guinness Book of World Records." And so when she was,
like, seven or eight, she tried to make
the longest hopscotch course in the
driveway with chalk. And then another one
was she was going to try to put the most
socks on one foot. Anyway, a year
ago, she announced that for her 16th birthday
she was going to try again, but this time she was
going to do an exercise. Do you know the exercise
called the plank? Does anyone know
what the plank is? It's kind of an abdominal
exercise where you lie down and you put your elbows down
and you hold your body straight. I don't know how
long you can do it, but I can do it for about
a minute, maybe two. Anyway, Gabby wrote away to
the "Guiness Book of World Records," and it
turned out the women, female record was 40 minutes. But she went into training. And when her
birthday came by, she was going to do it at
her birthday party, actually, try to break this. And we had to get a little
video camera or whatever, just if she did break
it to be able to send it in to the "Guinness
Book of World Records" and have a certain number
of witnesses and so on. And believe it or not, she went
for an hour and 20 minutes. And she's now in the 2015 book
of Guinness World Records. So I'm just saying, it's
just an example of someone who is able to not just take
her circumstances for whatever, but just to reframe
that ability. By getting to yes
with herself, then she was able to get to
yes with others. In my book, there's
a whole set of steps. I've gone over a few of them. Put yourself in your shoes. Develop your inner BATNA. Reframe your picture,
which then allows you to stay in
the zone, which is the place of peak performance,
the place of flow, which athletes know
and artists know. And the question
is, can we apply that in our own
daily situations, in our own conflicts
and negotiations, the place of
highest satisfaction and performance, which
also then allows us-- because we've taken care of
our own psychological needs-- to be able to respect
people, even if at first they don't respect us? Which turns out to be
key because so often I find in conflict
situations what happens is the other side rejects
us, so we reject them back. And then they reject us back. And we get locked into it. Someone has to break that cycle. It could be us, but
it can only be us if we are drawing on
our own self respect. If we are drawing
our own nourishment, which then allows us
to give and receive and to get into a
more cooperative mode. So what I've found
here is there's a whole set of steps, that are
kind of inner homework, that allow us to get to yes much
more easily with others. Starting with an inner yes,
it produces an outer yes. And effectively
what this does is it provides
[INAUDIBLE] with three wins, three
victories in the end. One is a victory
inside of ourselves, which is greater satisfaction. And the other is a win-win. We're much more likely
to reach mutually acceptable and satisfactory
agreements with others. But ultimately, it also
brings a win-win-win, which is it induces
a more generous, a more compassionate
perspective that allows us to help
the larger whole, whether it's the family,
the workplace, or the world. So let me just end this talk
and take some questions, but with one last story. I spent a lot of time
in the Middle East. I'm just headed there,
actually, in a few weeks. I have a project that we use
Google Maps for of developing kind of an out-of-the-box,
innovative idea of a long-distance walking trail
across the Middle East that retraces the
footsteps of Abraham. And it kind of just
brings people together. You walk and you stay
in people's homes. And it's developing. We have about 1,000 kilometers. It's called Abraham Path. We have a website. And we use Google Earth,
and Google AdWords has been very kind to us. But anyway, one of my
favorite negotiating stories that comes from the
Middle East is a story about three brothers, who
receive an inheritance from their father of 17 camels. And the older son
receives half the camels. The middle son receives
a third of the camels, and the youngest son, he
receives a ninth of the camels. Well, three sons fall to
dividing up their inheritance. But 17 doesn't divide by 2
and it doesn't divide by 3 and it doesn't divide by 9. So they get into a
big of a quarrel, and each one wants more. And brotherly tempers
start to get strained, and there's almost violence. Finally, in desperation,
they go and they consult a wise old woman. And the wise old woman,
like a good boss, thinks about their
problem and says, well, I don't have an answer. But if you want,
let me empower you. You can have my camel. I have one camel. So the three sons say, OK. So then they have 18 camels. Well, 18 does divide by 2, so
the first son takes his half. Half of 18 is 9. 18 does divide by 3. The second son takes
his third, which is 6. 18 does divide by 9. The third son takes his
ninth, which is two. You add 9 and 6, 15, plus 2, 17. They have one camel left over. They give it back to
the wise old woman. Now if you think about
that problem for a moment, I think it resembles a
little bit the negotiations that we often get involved. There seems to be, 17 camels,
no way to divide it up. Somehow what we need to do is
to learn to take a step back to the balcony, change
our assumptions, and look for an 18th camel. And my suggestion
is that 18th camel might in fact be ourselves. If we can get to
yes with ourselves, we're much more likely to
get to yes with others. Thank you very much. So we have some time for
some questions about anything in this field of
negotiation, [INAUDIBLE]. AUDIENCE: You
talked a little bit about this at the beginning,
but over your career with negotiations, how do you
see the internet and technology and even Google and Facebook
changing what you do and changing how
negotiations happen? You talked about how
the hierarchy was flattening and
doing [INAUDIBLE]. And so there's
more negotiations. To me, it seems like
you see a lot of people going out and broadcasting
on social media and trying to stake
out their own positions and making it harder
to negotiate, maybe. WILLIAM URY: For
sure-- you know, it cuts in a lot
of different ways. But one thing that
is very clear-- it's changing the framework. A lot of people are taking
their negotiations online, in many ways. And in terms of conflicts
like that, you see-- I mean, it's partly the internet. It's partly cable TV and so on. But you see a segmenting,
where people are only talking to people
who agree with them. And you see a lot of kind of
use of inflammatory rhetoric that goes online and that
before wasn't broadcast. Or you see, for example,
I mean right now you see, like, ISIS has gotten
very social media savvy. They're doing these horrific
beheadings with social media and using that. So I think we're just in this
first generation of figuring out how do we deal
with our differences given this whole new
way of communicating. And we're in this mix, too. I think the form of
decision making is shifting, but what's also
happening, I see, is that nowadays everyone
wants to participate in decisions that affect them. People are not nearly as
passive as they were before. You know, they were saying,
OK, let the leader decide. No, everyone wants
to have a voice, and you're starting to show
this up in social media. And so in a funny way,
this negotiation revolution means, at least in the short
run, a lot more conflict. Because a lot of conflict that
was suppressed and avoided before, injustice that
there were never addressed, are now coming to the surface. And so it's actually to me,
in the field of conflict resolution, I see the task
facing humanity right now is not so much how we settle. We can't settle all
these conflicts. The question is, can
we transform conflicts? Can we change their form from a
violent and destructive form-- even violent in terms of words,
like you're talking about. Can we learn to use more
constructive and cooperative language, even as we
carry on a struggle? Because with all the
injustice in the world, we maybe need conflict,
actually, to engage it. But can we learn to do
that in an engaging way? And what I found,
like 35 years ago when I started in this field, there
were no courses on negotiation. Now there's every business
school, law school, school of government,
corporations, you know, Google-- we have courses. But I think we're in
the infancy of learning. And what I would love to see
is the kind of creativity and the genius that
goes on here at Google and kind of better forms
of software and everything, but used on the software
of human relationships and used on the software of how
we deal with our differences. And to me, that's
the great challenge. And I would love to see the
mix of looking for the best kind of new methods,
new processes, married together with technology
and see what that would do. Because I'm an optimist. I happen to believe-- or at
least I'm a potentialist. I really think that human
beings have the potential, but I think the
jury is still out. We've got this technology
that's being used for weapons. Can we take the same
technology and use it for, as you're using it for,
better forms of communication. AUDIENCE: I had a question about
just different kind of thoughts or voices that you might
have going on inside. So with kind of
the balcony view, you get to really take
perspective, take a step back. But then, like, do you
have any personal stories on your journey to
developing that balcony and really being
able to figure out which voice inside
your head to say yes to and developing that awareness
for which ones to say yes to? WILLIAM URY: Yeah,
a good question. Yeah, I mean, this is something. I was just talking
with Meng about this. But for me, yeah, it
began with-- everyone has their favorite ways
of going to the balcony. Meditation, for example, is a
wonderful, time-honored, old practice. And for me, personally,
one thing I love to do is-- you have the advantage
here of using nature. What I like to do
is I like to go for walks, just to
kind of clear my mind. Like, for example, when
I was in Venezuela. You need to look for what
methodologies work for you. I mean, for me, I
was looking for ways that kind of, like, change
the rhythm of my brain a little bit, just
kind of put myself into more of a calm state
so that I could clear. And then what I learned was
just a simple rule of thumb, for example, that
helped me was, don't make an important
decision at the table. In other words, when
someone's asking you, OK, what's your bottom line? What's this? Just say, let me
get back to you. I'll get back to
you this afternoon. I'll get back to you in an hour. I'll get back to you
tomorrow morning. Just what that
did was it allowed me, then, to go to a balcony and
try to go to a place of clarity so that I could listen. Because I find that the
mind's a little bit like water that comes out of a tap. There's lot of fizz in it. And if you can just put it aside
for five minutes, you know, the fizz clears and
you can clarify it. So I've sort of
learned to do that. And I think everyone will
have their own method for doing that, of how
you kind of clarify. But just buying time, buying
a little bit of time-- and I know that in
today's day and age, we're being asked to make
quicker decisions, quicker things, partly due
to the internet, you know, the response rate. It used to be write a letter. It took two weeks to
get back a letter. Now people want an
answer in an hour because they just sent
you a text or an email. But to me the motto is
in a fast age like this, there's a paradox, which
is if you want to go fast, you need to go slow. There's a paradox of looking
for ways to slow it down, even if it's just a few seconds
or a few minutes-- breathing, for example, as a technique. It just brings more
oxygen to your brain. It's just kind of, like, take
a couple deep breaths and just be careful about making
decisions right on the spot. And that's been helpful to me. And then I mean the
other thing I'll say, too, is that I'm amazed
at how if I do that, it's like a muscle. You develop more,
but you get clarity about which voice to listen to. It becomes clear. And then if I can't do that,
sometimes you can use a friend. You can use a friend as your
balcony or a couple of friends because sometimes we're
blind to our own blind spots. But the friends can
see them more easily. MALE SPEAKER: Thank
you for being here. A quick question about
cultural differences to people negotiating--
so in your experience, you've seen a lot of different
types of cultures negotiate. Do you think there's one
universal way that people are wired to
negotiate, or do you think there are true
cultural differences to how people negotiate? WILLIAM URY: I'm an
anthropologist by training, so I have a bias here,
I'll have to say. But I do think there are
strong cultural differences. And that's not to say
that there are not some universal principles or
some universal-- so there are. There's maybe a kind of an
under structure of universality, but then the way
in which those get manifested-- very
different in cultures. Because cultures are
like communication They're like languages. And so they're just different
ways of communicating, but, like, there are
a lot of assumptions that are embedded in cultures. Like, for example, around
time-- American culture is one of the most impatient
cultures on the planet. But if you go to other cultures
around the world-- for us, time is money. That's the expression here. Time is money. In most other places,
time is relationship. And we want to go there
and do a quick deal, and they're saying, whoa,
hold on for a moment. We haven't established
a relationship that builds the necessary trust. Or, for example, what's
the nature of an agreement? We have a highly
legalized culture. There are more lawyers,
say, in the city of Los Angeles than there are
in the whole country of Japan. Because we're used
to saying, OK, we're going to have a legal culture. And if you don't
keep your contract, we're going to sue you. And we've got this whole thing. In many other
cultures, they don't depend on the courts for that. What they depend on is having
built long-term relationships, so that's the way in which
they achieve compliance. One last thing I'll
say about culture-- this could go on for awhile--
is I had a friend, a colleague, who was one of the
first anthropologists to really look at
cross-cultural communication. His name was Edward Hall. And he coined a distinction
I find very useful, which is he said, cultures are
like communication systems. And he defined it
like a continuum, from what he called
low-context communication to high-context communication. In low-context communication,
the content is pretty much all you need to see. In high-context communication,
you get the content. But if you don't
understand the context, you don't understand anything. So a classic example
of high-context culture would be in East Asia,
say, Japan, for example. One classic
negotiation in Japan, historically, was
when the Shogun, who was the military dictator of
Japan a couple centuries ago. When he ceded power to the
emperor, what did he do? He paid a visit to the Emperor. They had some tea together,
and then he went away. Note, there was no
signed agreement, I wasn't handing over
power to him, like that. But it was very clear to
everyone in Japan what had just happened because he
went to the Emperor. The Emperor didn't
go to him, and they understood the context. But the US is a lower
context culture. So that we'll send, for
example, Google or whatever, you'll send someone
down to, say, Latin America, which is
a higher context culture. And you'll send someone
who is the most capable, the one who knows
the most knowledge. He's got all the facts
and everything like that, but they may be 22 for 25. And they show up
in Latin America, and they say, wait a minute. They just sent us a kid. Because for them the
social context of, wait a minute, who is this
person in relation to who and whatever? Are we supposed to
trust this person? So they may not put as much
emphasis on the content as we do in this culture. And so understanding
those differences is really important. MALE SPEAKER: Having
said that, thank you very much for
speaking with us today. We'll do a book
signing in the back, and you can check out
his book on Google Play and wherever books are sold. WILLIAM URY: Great,
and thank you. May you get to yes with
yourself and with others. And more information about me,
if you ever want to contact me or whatever, there's
my information. But it's been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it, and I'm
happy to sign a few books.
