BRIAN: Our guest today is Bill Ury.
Bill's written and published several books.
He's here with one of those books, which is "Getting to Yes
with Yourself."
As I read your press on your site,
it's almost looking at it as a prequel to "Getting to Yes,"
which was your first book, which has been printed
12 million times in English and has
been published in 37 languages.
So we've got quite an accomplished,
well read individual with us today.
Other books are "The Third Side,"
"Getting Past No," and "The Power of a Positive No."
But that's just a small bit of who Bill is.
And I don't know if-- for those of you who
I sent the link around to his page,
I'll try not to bore you or try not to go on for too long.
But he's the co-founder of Harvard's program
on negotiation.
And he's currently a distinguished senior fellow
at Harvard, correct?
But this is where it starts to get really, really interesting.
He's worked providing mediation services in conflicts ranging
from Kentucky coal mines to the Middle East and to the Balkans.
He's worked with Jimmy Carter to create an organization
to help avert or solve for civil wars
where he's actually traveled to Indonesia
and helped to resolve a civil war,
and in Venezuela to prevent a civil war.
So later today when you think you're really cool
and you've closed that $20,000 upgrade for your client,
think back to this and you'll put it in perspective, OK?
It's still really cool.
Go close it.
But put it in perspective.
He's also won several awards or been recognized
many, many times for his work.
There were one or two that jumped off the page for me.
He's won a Distinguished Service medal from Russia for his work.
So in addition to everything else that I've
been telling you, he actually might be a spy for all we know.
He has a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard.
The work that he's done in terms of global political conflict
is just part of what he does.
He also works with top corporate executives
in training them to learn how to be better mediators and better
negotiators.
And what I'm really looking forward today
is hearing how you kind of marry global conflict resolution
to good business practices.
And after Bill speaks with us for a few minutes
and presents to us, I hope we can
have a wide open conversation around that.
We have between 15 and 20 of his most recent books
here today, so after the talk if you'd like one,
please grab one.
If you'd really like one and there isn't one left for you,
just get in touch with me afterwards
and we'll get a few more for those people who
really want them, OK?
So thanks for coming today.
Welcome, Bill.
Bill, it's all yours.
WILLIAM URY: OK.
Thanks, Brian.
[APPLAUSE]
Appreciate it.
That was quite an intro.
What I want to talk with you this morning
is really about what I think is one
of the more important, valuable, useful skills that any of us
can have in today's challenging times,
and that's a skill of negotiation, of getting to yes,
of trying to reach agreement with others.
And as I've been in this field ever since I
was a graduate student up the way
here at Harvard many years ago, I've
had kind of like a front seat view on something
that I call a revolution that actually accompanies
the knowledge revolution, the information
revolution of which Google is a part, which
is a more silent revolution, but it's
a revolution in the way in which we as individuals,
organizations, or societies make decisions.
Because typically a generation or two ago,
the main way in which people made
decisions was people on the top of the pyramids of power
gave the orders, and the people on the bottom
simply followed the orders.
And now thanks to the information revolution,
those pyramids of power are starting
to collapse into organizational forms
that more resemble networks, flatter
forms, more horizontal forms.
And as that shifts, the form of decision making shifts
from vertical to horizontal, and another name
for horizontal decision making is negotiation, is getting yes.
So that to get our jobs done nowadays,
we're literally dependent on dozens, hundreds, thousands
of individuals, organizations over whom
we exercise no direct control.
If we want to get to yes with them, we have to negotiate.
So let me just actually ask you, if you don't mind,
a few quick questions about your own negotiating experience.
Because if you think about it, what I'm interested in
is what stops us from getting the yes?
So let me just ask you to think about your own experience
for a moment here and ask yourself the question of, if I
were to define negotiation very simply and very broadly
as trying to reach agreement with someone-- you have
some interests which maybe you hold in common
like an ongoing relationship with a customer,
and some interests which maybe are in tension with each other,
like you'd like to get more money for your contract
for Google, and maybe they'd like to pay you less,
who do you find yourself negotiating
with in the broad sense of the term in the course of your day?
Just if you wouldn't mind just calling it out.
Who do you negotiate with?
AUDIENCE: Spouse.
WILLIAM URY: Your spouse.
OK, we'll start with the hard ones there.
AUDIENCE: Your children.
WILLIAM URY: Your children, OK.
Who else?
Your what?
AUDIENCE: Colleagues.
WILLIAM URY: Your colleagues.
OK.
Who else?
AUDIENCE: Internal teams.
WILLIAM URY: Your what?
AUDIENCE: Internal teams.
WILLIAM URY: Internal teams.
Right.
AUDIENCE: CMOs.
WILLIAM URY: What was that?
AUDIENCE: CMOs.
WILLIAM URY: CMOs, OK.
CMOs.
Who else?
AUDIENCE: My teenagers.
WILLIAM URY: Your teenagers.
OK.
So it's at home, it's at work.
Now if you were to kind of just make a ballpark estimate
of how much of your time do you spend broadly
speaking in the course of your day,
engaged in the process of back and forth communication, trying
to reach agreement with your teenagers, your spouse,
your colleagues, your clients, your suppliers, your boss,
the internal partners, and so on?
What percentage of your time do you
think it would be, what fraction of the time if you
had to give it a certain percentage?
What would you say?
AUDIENCE: About half.
AUDIENCE: Half.
WILLIAM URY: Half.
Yeah.
How many would agree with that?
It's at least half?
OK.
So we don't always think of it formally as negotiation,
but in the informal sense, we're engaged in this process
from the time we get up in the morning with our spouse,
teenagers, kids, and so on to the time we go to bed at night.
And so let me just ask you a couple other questions.
I mean, would you say, maybe looking
at the past, say, five or 10 years of your work career,
would you say that the amount of time
that you spend negotiating, has it stayed pretty steady?
Does it go down over time as you get
maybe more authority in your job?
Or does it go up?
What would you say?
AUDIENCE: Up.
WILLIAM URY: How many say it's going up?
OK, almost all of you.
So that's the negotiation revolution in form.
And I've travelled around the world,
and every country around the world I see this revolution
taking place in the way in which we make decisions.
More and more negotiation.
And--
AUDIENCE: Even in Russia?
WILLIAM URY: Even in Russia.
[LAUGHS]
Even in Russia.
A little slower in Russia, but even in Russia.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Well, you know, I used to go to Russia
back in the days of the Cold War.
And even though change has been slow sometimes,
it's changed a lot since those days.
There's a lot more negotiation going on.
In fact, "Getting to Yes," I remember when it first
came out, there were some Russian friends
who wanted to translate it into Russian,
but they thought negotiation was subversive.
They didn't want to teach people how
to negotiate because then they would challenge authority.
But now there are Russian editions of it.
So one thing that I think might be useful just for the next,
you know, we've got this hour together here,
is if you have in mind at least one
challenging negotiation that you're currently facing,
something, it might be just for yourself.
It might be with your teenager or it
might be with your customer, it might
be an internal negotiation with a CMO, or whoever it is,
have in mind some challenging negotiation, OK?
Everyone got at least one in mind?
So let me ask you a quick question then
about the one you just selected.
There are maybe two types of negotiations we engage in,
the internal negotiations inside the organization
with our colleagues and coworkers
and so on, and then there are the external negotiations,
let's say, with clients, for example, or suppliers.
How many of you, just out of curiosity,
have just selected an external situation?
External.
OK?
How many of you selected an internal situation?
OK.
And just out of curiosity, if you
had to say which one was harder, the negotiation inside
or the negotiation outside, if you
had to just make a broad generalization, which
personally do you find more challenging?
Internal negotiations or external?
AUDIENCE: Internal.
WILLIAM URY: How many would say external?
OK.
How many would say internal?
OK.
Great.
I mean, obviously both can be challenging.
But the great majority of hands go up
on internal, which is interesting that oftentimes we
experience the more challenging negotiations as being
the ones with the people with whom supposedly we're
on the same team working for the same mission, whatever,
but those are often more challenging.
Well over the years, my passion over the years
has been helping people get to yes, individuals,
organizations, societies, as Brian was mentioning, even
in war-like situations.
And the thing that sort of struck me over the years
is when my colleagues and I wrote "Getting to Yes,"
the most frequent question we got for a while was, yeah,
but how do you get to yes with the people who
don't want to get to yes, you know?
How do you deal with people who are
kind of rigid and they're intransigent
or they're using dirty tricks, or all kinds of things?
So I kind of specialized in that for a long time.
In fact, my follow on book was a book
called "Getting Past No," which was negotiating
with difficult people, negotiating
in difficult situations.
But over the years I began to realize that in fact, perhaps
the most difficult person we have
to deal with in a negotiation, in the process of getting
to yes, be it with our teenagers,
our spouses, our coworkers, or our clients,
is not what we think it is.
It's not just the difficult person
on the other side of the table, as difficult
as that person can be.
Actually the biggest obstacle to us
getting what we want in negotiation, curiously enough,
is right here.
It's ourselves.
It's the person on this side of the table.
It's the person we look at in the mirror.
Because after all, what could be more internal?
It feels to me like the more internal the negotiation goes,
the more difficult it is.
What could be more internal than ourselves?
And so our biggest opponent actually,
the person who's going to give us the most trouble
often is the person we're looking at in the mirror.
I think it was Teddy Roosevelt who
once said, if you could kick in the pants
the person who's going to give you the most trouble that day,
you wouldn't sit for a month.
And so to me, that obstacle can also
become our biggest opportunity.
If we can turn our own inner opponent,
as it were, into our biggest ally.
And that's really the subject of this book, my newest book,
which is "Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy
Opponents."
And where it lies is to me it lies
in our very understandable, very natural human tendency
to react.
In other words, to act without thinking.
I mean, negotiation is supposed to be goal oriented behavior.
You're looking rationally to advance your objective.
But oftentimes our own emotions, for example, get in the way.
As Ambrose Bierce one said, when angry,
you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
And it happens a lot these days.
And so the first and most important negotiation
starts within.
And I want to talk a little bit about that,
but then I don't want to go too deep into this
without really drawing you out more
and getting into your own situations.
But just to highlight a couple of points here from this.
To me, interestingly, the foundation
of being able to get to yes with yourself
is the ability to step back from the situation.
And I like to use the metaphor going to the balcony.
It's almost like you're negotiating
with the other person on a stage.
Part of your mind goes to a mental or emotional balcony
overlooking that stage where it's
a place of calm, of perspective, of self-control, where you
above all can keep your eyes on the prize.
And for example, these days there's
so much going on in our lives.
We get texts, we get emails, we get calls.
There's so much information flooding in all the time.
And let's imagine you get an email, an internal message
from your organization, and you've
been left out of an important decision.
And you feel irritated.
You feel frustrated.
You feel pissed.
So it's very tempting to just kind of compose a reply, right?
And then you get the 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 to the entire organization.
And there's a button on that screen
sometimes, or at least it used to be,
which is the Save As Draft button, you know?
That's the button that very rarely gets used.
And you compose it, you get it out of your system,
you hit Save As Draft.
That's the balcony button.
And you do whatever you-- everyone
has their favorite techniques for going to the balcony.
They might be go for a workout, go have a cup of coffee
with a friend, whatever.
Take a night to sleep on it.
Just take a few minutes by yourself.
Whatever your technique is for going to that balcony, you're
going to come back, look at that message, that email,
and you're going to say, wait a minute.
Is this really going to advance my interests in the situation?
And you're going to hit the Delete button,
and then either going to pick up the phone
and call the person, or even better
get together with them if you can do that.
Because when you're going to resolve a difference like that,
it's much easier to do that with more ability
to communicate with a voice, for example,
than it is through an email.
Emails lend themselves very much to miscommunication.
They're great for information transfer,
but not so good for handling delicate or possibly
emotionally sensitive issues.
So that's kind of going to the balcony.
You know, if I think about my own personal experience--
Brian was asking me to tell a story too
about my own personal experience-- some years ago,
I was involved as a third party in the country of Venezuela.
And it was at a time when Venezuela, there were,
like, a million people on the streets
calling for the downfall of the president, who
was then Hugo Chavez.
And about a million people on the streets
wanting to support him.
And international observers worried
that it might turn into a civil war.
And I had been asked by President Carter
to go down and meet with both parties and talk to them.
And anyway, I had a number of meetings with both sides.
I want to talk about one particular meeting
I had with President Chavez.
He liked to meet at night, so we had made a meeting
at the presidential palace at 9:00 PM.
He was a little bit late.
10:00 PM, 11:00 PM.
Finally at midnight I'm ushered in
to see the president expecting to find him all alone.
Instead I find him surrounded by his entire cabinet.
And he kind pulls up a seat, says, here Bill.
Have a seat here.
And tell me.
What do you think of the situation.
What's your impression?
And how are we doing?
And I said, you know, Mr. President,
I've been talking to some of your ministers here,
I've been talking to the opposition.
And it seems to me we're making some progress.
He said, what do you mean, progress?
Are you blind?
Are you naive?
What are you, foolish?
You're not seeing the dirty tricks the other side,
those traitors on the other side are up to?
He proceeded to get furious and he leaned in very close
to my face and proceeded to yell at me for, I'd say,
approximately 30 minutes.
Now you put yourself in my shoes for a moment.
I'm thinking, well, hey, that's not true.
We're not foolish.
And he's not seeing this.
And I'm wanting to defend myself.
But I was able to go to the balcony for a moment.
And actually one little technique
that helped me go the balcony was a friend of mine
a few months earlier had said, you know Bill,
if you're ever in a tough situation,
he said, pinch the palm of your hand.
And I said, Arnon, why would I pinch the palm of my hand?
And he said, well, because that'll keep you alert.
And maybe it'll keep you a little more alert.
So at that moment, for whatever reason,
I remembered the pinch the palm of my hand.
And because at that mind, in just
in terms of thinking about it, I was thinking, wow, two
years of work all down the drain, you know?
You go through all these things.
And I'm sure, tough customer calls sometimes,
you can literally, you know, you think
you might be losing that important customer, and so on.
So at that moment I just was able to go to the balcony,
not react.
Because if I had reacted, I mean,
President Chavez was famous for giving eight hour speeches.
I mean, the conversation could go way off the rails.
And that might have been the end.
But by not reacting, by going to the balcony,
by listening instead, I was able to listen, just kind of clear
my mind because I was able to observe myself
from the balcony, just note the thoughts
and the feelings that are going through me.
Just, OK, that's fine.
Now let me pay attention to President Chavez
and just give attention to him and try
and figure out what was going on for him.
I mean, why was he yelling at me?
What was going on?
Was this some kind of show for the cabinet and so on?
What was irritating him so much?
And sure enough, by just listening to them,
he could have gone on forever, but since I wasn't reacting,
after about a half an hour he started
to run a little bit how the steam.
Even he did.
And then I saw, if you just watch body language,
I saw his shoulders sink a little bit.
And in a very weary tone of voice he said to me,
so Ury, what should I do?
That is the sound of a human mind opening.
Before that, if someone's angry with you,
like it's your spouse, your teenager, or whatever,
it's very hard to use reason with someone
who's in a highly emotional state of mind.
It's like beating your head against a stone wall.
But by listening, he kind of went
into a different emotional phase of kind of like, OK.
So what should I do?
And I said, Mr. President, this is December.
Christmas is coming up.
Last Christmas all the festivities around the country
were canceled.
No one had any fun because of this conflict.
Why don't you just declare a truce?
Give everyone a chance to go to the balcony for a few weeks.
Enjoy the family with their holidays,
and maybe when they come back in January everyone
will be in a better mood to listen and see
if we can make some progress.
He said, oh, that's a great idea.
I'm going to propose that in my next speech.
And then his mood had completely shifted.
He said, you know, and over Christmas, I
think I'd like you to come with me
and actually see around the country.
And you come with me.
And then he said, for a moment he said, wait.
If you're always with me, maybe you
won't be seen as a neutral anymore.
But he said, that's no problem.
I'll give you a disguise.
[LAUGHTER]
Complete shift.
How?
Because I had been able to get to yes in a sense with myself,
restrain my own natural reaction to defend myself.
You know, it would have gotten no use
to get into an argument with the president of Venezuela.
I was able to go to the balcony and then
I was able to shift that situation.
Just one example.
Let me ask you, just if I may, what techniques
you use to go to the balcony in your very busy hectic lives,
either work or personal.
What do you do to go to the balcony?
Anybody?
AUDIENCE: Sleep on it.
WILLIAM URY: You sleep on it.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Go for a walk.
WILLIAM URY: Go for a walk.
AUDIENCE: Fresh air.
WILLIAM URY: Fresh air.
Yeah.
Anything else?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] draft emails, but save them.
WILLIAM URY: You draft emails and then save them, right?
Save As Draft.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Talk to a colleague.
WILLIAM URY: Talk to a colleague.
Yeah.
Someone else can be your balcony.
OK.
Good.
Let me, if I may, just give you one more story,
and then I want to see what's on your minds.
And it'll open it up to conversation here,
and see what kind of questions you've got.
But this conversation that I met with President Chavez
was 10, 12 years ago.
But a more recent one that I got involved in,
which was a business conversation,
was about a year, year and a half ago.
The wife and daughter of a very prominent
Brazilian entrepreneur got in touch with me.
He was the founder of Latin America's largest retailer,
really, and build up this business from nothing.
He was a billionaire.
And he had sold half of his company
to a French also billionaire, president
of a very large French conglomerate.
And they'd worked together for some years,
and then they'd had a falling out.
And so they're fighting over control.
And Abilio was the name of the person I went see.
And he was, like, 76 at the time.
He was going to be chairman of the board for another eight
years.
Two and a half years of just sheer battle.
I mean, every lawyer you could imagine.
I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of lawyers,
arbitration suits, it was all over the papers.
I think the "Financial Times" called it perhaps the biggest
cross-continental boardroom showdown in recent history.
And it was not just affecting the immediate parties,
but their families, 150,000 employees of the company.
It was even straining Brazil-French commercial
relations.
Anyway, so I sat down with Abilio.
I didn't know if I could help, but I sat down with him
in his living room there in Sao Paulo,
and I asked them to tell me a story.
And he told me the story.
And then I said, then I realized, you know,
there's always this negotiation with the other side,
and that's extremely difficult.
But as I was saying, sometimes even more difficult
is the negotiation inside ourself.
And what I could sense inside Abilio
was he wasn't sure whether he wanted just continue to fight.
Was a fighter naturally.
You know, just fight and fight.
Or did he really want to reach an agreement?
And sometimes we're also torn in a lot of these situations.
What is it we want to do?
So I asked him, Abilio, what do you want?
How can I help you?
What do you really want here?
And he had a ready answer to that.
And he said, OK, I want the stock at a certain price,
I want elimination of the non-compete clause,
I want company real estate, I want--
and he had named five or six other things.
He gave me a laundry list of what he wanted.
He was clear about what he wanted.
But to me, that's just the beginning.
Because oftentimes, we think we know what we want,
but we don't know what we really want.
So I asked him, but Abilio, you're
a man who's got everything.
You've got your own private plane.
You can fly everywhere around the world.
You've got your new family.
You've got everything.
Is this is really what you want to do with your life
is get involved in the big dispute?
I mean, what do you really want?
What do you most want in your life right now?
Anyway, he kind of struggled with that question for a while,
but then after a bit he finally said to me,
you know what I want?
I want my freedom.
Freedom.
That's what I want.
And I said, so what does freedom mean to you?
And he says, well, it's freedom to pursue my business dreams,
my business deals and so on.
And I want free to spend time with my family.
So once we've gotten down to that level,
and oftentimes that's what we need to do inside ourselves.
Ask ourselves, what is it truly that's important to us?
What's the prize?
From the balcony that's what we do.
Then it turned out once it was clear,
then I could ask a follow on question.
I could ask Abilio the kind of question
like, OK, so you really want your freedom?
Who can give you that freedom?
Who can give you that sense of freedom,
the thing you most want in the world?
Who can give that to you?
Is it your adversary, the former business partner?
Is that the only person that can give you your freedom?
You're a total hostage to him?
Or at least to some extent can you
yourself give yourself that sense of freedom?
And that kind of, like, opened up a possibility.
He said, OK.
Yeah, well maybe I can give myself that freedom.
So there was this kind of psychological antecedent
there inside himself.
He said, well, I could go ahead and pursue business deals
regardless of what this other guys doing.
I can go spend time with my family on a holiday.
And he proceeded to do those things.
And paradoxically, by doing that,
he was psychologically less dependent on the other side.
And it actually made it easier for me
then when it came to trying to find
a resolution with the other side.
And as it turned out, this huge colossal, titanic struggle
that all these lawyers were [INAUDIBLE],
I met with the other side in Paris
on a Monday in a restaurant there.
And the representative on the other side
said, so why are you here?
And I said, you know, because life's too short.
Life's too short for these kinds of lose-lose struggles,
because that's what often happens
in battles is each side's trying to win.
It's a win-lose struggle.
But in the end, what happens is everyone ends up losing.
And it's affecting everyone.
So he said, so how would you settle this?
What's your proposal?
And I said, well, if we can just agree on two principles,
I think maybe we can maybe make some progress.
He said, what are those?
I said, freedom.
Freedom for each individual.
Let them go on with their lives and we'll figure out
a way to free them from this struggle.
And dignity because everyone wants respect.
He said, so what would that mean?
And he called me back in his office the next day
and we looked at it.
And on one piece of paper we sat down,
what would be some terms that would tangibly reflect freedom
for each individual and dignity?
That was on a Tuesday.
By Friday we had both men in a law office
in San Paulo signing a contract resolving the whole dispute,
joint press conference, they then
made a talk to all the employees of the company together,
wished each other well in the future, and it was all over.
And that night, actually, there was a dinner
held by my client for, I think there were about 40 lawyers who
just arrived in Sao Paulo for an arbitration lawsuit
and just from all over the world, from New York,
from Paris, from the Middle East or whatever,
the best lawyers in the world.
And they were out of a job, as it were.
So I'm just giving you as an example that here again, seemed
like a very complicated dispute, but it really
starts within us often.
And so this new book of mine is about how do we
get to yes with ourselves in order
that we can get to yes with others?
It's almost as if I've realized that we've been negotiating--
these days, we need all the tools
we can get in negotiation.
And it's almost like we've been negotiating
with one arm tied behind our back.
Because we've just been focused on outer influence.
How do we influence the other side?
And we've neglected, sometimes, our ability
to influence ourselves who, after all, is our best
instrument for influencing others.
And so we can negotiate with both arms together.
So that's the essence of this book.
But at this point what I'd love to do
is just to see what's on your minds in terms of negotiation.
Any questions, any kinds of subjects,
any kinds of things that are giving you difficulty?
Think back to your own situation.
What makes them difficult?
Whether its customers, whether it's teenagers,
or whether you want to talk about world politics, anything.
Yes ma'am?
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned in each of these cases
that there's a million people around these individuals.
So I guess my question is, what do you
do when you have a toxic person or in arbitration [INAUDIBLE]
have the numbers.
How do you get them-- how often do
you see them influencing what's riling up both sides, right?
So if they're going into it and you've got a person,
you can get them alone, get them talking,
and the you can get to this resolution.
But when you've got these other people sort of in their ear,
how often do you need to influence them,
and what kind of [INAUDIBLE]?
WILLIAM URY: The question was, what do you
do about toxic individuals who may not be at the table
but are kind of poisoning the well, right?
So one thing to think about in negotiation
is what I like to think about is there's not just one
table in the negotiation to focus on.
In other words, you and the client
or you and the internal colleague or whatever,
always keep in mind that there are
three tables in the negotiation.
There's the table where you and the other side are talking,
but there's the internal tables on each side, the people you
have to go back to and report to an agreement about.
It might be your boss or your colleagues,
whoever, your family, and the people they [INAUDIBLE].
And essentially, that toxic individual you're talking about
is often sitting at that internal table as a spoiler.
They're kind of trying to block it.
And that's not uncommon in any negotiation.
Oftentimes, the real problems in negotiations
aren't at the external table.
It's at the two internal tables.
Those two internal negotiations where
you need to pay attention to just as much
as at what we think of as the negotiation
with the other side.
And so how do you disarm that toxic person?
One is first of all, you can try and find ways to talk to them,
find out what their real concern is.
What are they really concerned about?
See if you can.
And deal with that.
If you can't do that then you've got to think about,
how do you build kind of a winning coalition
inside the other team that they neutralize that person?
But it's not uncommon at all.
Right now, for example, well, my very first negotiation--
because when I was just starting off of this field,
I realized it's not just in the books.
You need to get out there in the real world.
So I got a job working at a coal mine in Kentucky
as Brian mentioned.
And this was a situation where the workforce was
going on strike all the time, what
were called wildcat strikes in contravention of the contract.
And tensions had gotten really high
and there was a lot of anger.
And when we got down, my colleague and I got down there,
management and the union would not even sit in the same room
together.
That's how bad things were.
So we just shuttled back and forth for about six weeks
until we had some proposals on the table
that both sides were interested.
And they came together and they reached an agreement.
And there was maybe, I don't know, maybe 10 people
representing labor and maybe 10 people representing management.
And we had a whole big pow wow.
It was like a peace agreement, and everyone was happy.
Except for one little critical detail
which had to be ratified by the workforce.
There had to be a vote.
And a week later the vote took place, almost unanimous,
in rejecting the very agreement that their leaders had just
negotiated.
Why they rejected it is partly because of what you're saying,
because there were some toxic individuals who were saying,
hey, don't trust management.
Don't trust anything that they do.
Even though the agreement on the surface and in reality
was much better for the union than their existing agreement
they thought, there must be a trick
if management's signing up to it.
So then we had to go back to square one and try to address
and deal with that toxicity, deal with that skepticism,
and go back to square one.
So it was an everlasting lesson for me
of dealing with those situations.
Please.
AUDIENCE: This is maybe slightly tangential,
but I think a lot of people are probably
thinking about it here.
You may know that Google has kind
of a long relationship with Stuart Diamond who
comes and teaches these courses that are always
sold out all over the place.
And I've taken one of his courses.
I'm sure you'd want to remain on the balcony
in talking about somebody else who's in the same field,
but I'm wondering, his approach partly to me
seems to come out of sort of more of the Stephen Covey type,
more formulaic, seven steps to this and that.
I mean, he distills his formula onto a business card
which he hands out at the end of the course.
His slogan is getting more.
I guess getting to yes was not enough for a business guy.
Always got to get more.
Anyway, I'm wondering if you would have any comments
on that kind of an approach that he lays out-- as I say,
I think a lot of people here have taken it
and are pretty familiar with it--
how that kind of contrasts with your interests.
This whole negotiation [INAUDIBLE] course is very rich
and has so many roots in game theory
and all kinds of other things.
And I'm just singling this one out
because it's probably the one that people at Google
are most familiar with.
So I'm wondering if you'd maybe have any contrast
or comparisons to your own approach there.
WILLIAM URY: Yeah.
I wish I actually was more familiar with his work,
but I'm familiar with Stephen Covey's work,
and Steven Covey was a friend of mine.
And Covey actually, his approach was very much congruent
with what we're talking about.
He very much believed in what's called win-win.
When "Getting to Yes" first came out,
I feel like the bestselling books about negotiation
had titles like, "Winning by Intimidation"
and "Looking Out for #1."
[LAUGHS]
I don't know if you remember those.
But "Getting to Yes" proposed that, yes,
you want to meet, satisfy your interests.
The purpose of negotiation is to satisfy your interests.
But in ongoing relationships, just
as you were mentioning with game theory,
if you're just playing the prisoner's dilemma and game
theory, just one round, it may be in your interests
to defect rather than cooperate.
But in any kind of ongoing relationship,
be it inside the organization or be
it a longstanding relationship with clients or suppliers
or whatever, it makes sense to cooperate.
It makes sense to cooperate.
And so yes, you want to get more, more for yourself,
but one of the best ways of getting more for yourself
is actually to expand the pie, to be creative and expand
the pie so there's more for you and more for the customer,
so that there's more for both.
And what "Getting to Yes" proposes
is that kind of approach where essentially, you
look behind positions for, what are the underlying needs?
What are the underlying interests, your interests,
and the other side's interests?
You try to invent options for mutual gain,
you try to expand the pie.
And where there are serious differences,
you make use of objective criteria
to decide, what's a fair way to divide up the pie?
So for example, here, actually, if you wouldn't mind,
let's do a two minute little negotiation challenge here.
If you wouldn't mind just pick a partner,
the person sitting right next to you.
And let's do a negotiation by email.
This will take 30 seconds.
OK, everyone pick a partner.
And just decide who's going to send the email
and who's going to receive the email, OK?
So here's the situation.
Let's imagine you two are department
heads in the same organization.
Let's say maybe it's Google, whatever.
You're not co-located.
One of you's here in Cambridge, one of you's
there in Mountain View, wherever.
And you have a common boss.
And this year the idea's been, we've got to cut costs.
And so let's say by the end of the year,
your common boss comes to both you and says, look,
you guys have done a great job.
But Everyone's done a great job cutting costs.
And I've got a little extra money left in the budget.
I don't know.
What would be a little bit significant?
Would it be, like, $500,000 or $100,000?
What would it be?
AUDIENCE: $100,000.
WILLIAM URY: Give me a number.
AUDIENCE: $500,000.
WILLIAM URY: $500,000.
OK, $500,000 left in the budget.
And he says, I don't know how to divide it between you
two different departments.
You guys decide.
So here are the rules, OK?
This is silent.
Silence done by email, so there's no talking.
It's just very simple.
The sender, you just take out a piece of paper
or if you don't have a piece of paper, it's fine too.
But just come up with two numbers
adding up to 500 for your proposal
for how to divide up the $500,000.
Now it's not so simple to just say $250,000 for each
because all your people at that internal table we were talking
about are saying, hey, we need all $500,000 you know,
for sales department or whatever it is.
We deserve it all.
You know?
That other team, they don't deserve it.
So you're under a lot of pressure
from your team to come back with as close to $500,000
as possible.
So you could put down as if you were emailing,
$500,000 for my department, zero for yours.
You could put down $475,000 for my department,
$25,000 for yours.
$450,000 for my department, and $50,000 for yours.
There's no creativity.
It's just two numbers here.
That's all you do.
It just takes 10 seconds.
That's your proposal.
Then those of you receive that number or those two numbers,
you have one decision to make.
Very simple.
Yes or no.
Either you accept it or you reject it.
That's it.
There's no follow on negotiation.
So if you say yes, you're going to get
whatever the other side's proposing.
You're going to get the $25,000, you're
going to get the $50,000, you're going to get whatever,
the $100,000.
If, however, you say no, neither department gets one penny.
Because the boss has said, look, if you two
can't reach agreement, that's OK.
I can find another use for the money.
So it's very simple.
Just two sequential decisions.
First person just picked two numbers that add up to 500,
the second person says yes or no,
and then we see the results, OK?
Takes 30 seconds.
No follow on negotiation and no talking
unless you just have to give me the proposal.
Everyone had a chance to go through the exercise?
OK, so it's just two sequential decisions.
Two numbers and then yes or no.
So I'm curious.
How many of you-- have you all had a chance to do it?
Yeah.
How many of you by curious said yes,
accepted the proposal you were offered?
OK?
How many of you said no, rejected
the proposal you were offered?
OK, a few of you.
So I'm kind of curious.
We're curious about why other people reject our proposals.
So let's just see if we can learn something here.
So Brian, you rejected the proposal
given to by Jonathan, right?
BRIAN: Yes.
WILLIAM URY: What proposal did he make?
BRIAN: $375,000 and $125,000.
WILLIAM URY: $375,000, $125,000.
So $375,000 for him, $125,000 for your department, right?
And why did you reject it?
BRIAN: $125,000 was close enough to zero for me.
[LAUGHTER]
WILLIAM URY: $125,000, OK.
So you have a very-- OK.
So that's one.
How about-- there were some others who rejected?
Yeah, you sir.
You rejected.
AUDIENCE: $350,000 to $150,000.
WILLIAM URY: $350,000 to $150,000.
AUDIENCE: It was fairness.
WILLIAM URY: Fairness.
Fairness.
Now see, this is really interesting,
because you have economically rational decision
makers who are being offered a decision between $125,000
and zero or $150,000 and zero, and what are they picking?
Zero.
Why?
Because, as you heard, perceived fairness
plays in a very important role in negotiation.
It's either people will walk away from proposals--
and we're going to be startled, because after all, rationally
speaking, it's in their interest to accept.
How many of you, for example, accepted
a proposal that was less than $250,000?
How many accepted?
OK.
And when you accepted that how many of you
thought to yourself, OK, I'm going to accept this,
but I'm going to remember this.
[LAUGHTER]
Right?
So that often happens.
How many of you, despite what I said, went ahead and just
proposed $250,000, $250,000 a 50/50 split?
Anybody?
You did.
And why'd you do that?
AUDIENCE: You know, in the spirit
of what you were talking about earlier in terms of freedom
is the fastest way to have both parties--
WILLIAM URY: It was a fast way to have both parties agree,
right?
OK.
Yeah.
OK.
AUDIENCE: I would have proposed--
WILLIAM URY: You would have proposed-- what was that?
AUDIENCE: Actually, Bob would have proposed,
but I would have proposed to give him $260,000,
so that next year, he'd have no excuse.
WILLIAM URY: There you go.
OK.
You know, it's interesting--
AUDIENCE: This year it looks like you need more than I do.
But next year [INAUDIBLE].
WILLIAM URY: He would have proposed $260,000 he said,
just to cultivate goodwill.
You know, I asked--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] goodwill.
WILLIAM URY: Then what is it?
AUDIENCE: It's create the expectation-- leverage.
WILLIAM URY: Leverage.
OK.
[LAUGHS]
OK.
Well, you know, it's interesting,
because I once ran this exercise in,
I think it was Japan, just asked that question.
And there was a large number of people
who adopted that strategy.
But when I asked them why, because in east Asia,
they tend to believe in long term relationships.
They were investing in the long term relationship.
So for $10,000 extra, they were investing more
in the relationship.
So there are a lot of ways to approach this,
but the thing is that since perceived fairness plays
an enormously important role, if the other side thinks
you're just trying to win at their expense, A,
they're going to remember it, B, or they sometimes
may refuse to deal.
And as you just saw, they'll just walk away.
They'll accept zero like Brian did.
And so the question is, how can you
create a situation in the negotiation
that each side feels like they got at least a fair shake?
And it's not just about the person across the table,
because as the question came from before about
the toxic people, whoever you deal
with has to go back to their constituency, to their people.
In this particular case, you have
to go back to your department.
They say, how come you agreed to $100,000?
They're screwing us.
So people need to have a logic.
And that's why objective criteria like--
I didn't give you any information,
but like, which is the larger department?
Which department costs more?
Which department could use the money better, and so on?
Some logical thing so that each side,
there's some narrative there that each side
can use to say, OK.
We both deferred to what's fair.
And so this is just, again, something
to think about in negotiations, the psychology of fairness.
Because it may seem small, but it actually
makes a really important difference,
particularly in long-term relationships.
And this may be also one reason why
is it that we experience internal negotiations as more
difficult than external.
It's partly because there's more emotion involved.
There's a more ongoing relationship.
Sometimes there's often a lot more avoidance behavior inside.
We don't want to deal with difficult conflicts
because we're afraid of long-term impact.
Everyone's got their little black book out.
So again, things to think about.
I know there were some other questions there, so yeah.
Please.
AUDIENCE: I realize we could spend another hour talking
about what I'm about to ask, so say as little as you want to.
But I'm curious for your take on the situation in Washington
and the inability, it seems, for the two sides to work together.
I just would love your take on what
may be sort of causing that or how
they could make their negotiations better.
And actually, in light of your book,
I wondered if maybe the Republican party now feels
a little bit better with themselves now
having majorities in both houses,
and maybe that helps [INAUDIBLE].
I don't know.
WILLIAM URY: Sure.
There's been this stalemate in Washington.
I mean, it seems like both parties have been busy
getting to no rather than getting to yes
for the last six years.
And certainly it's challenging, even for the next two years.
But to me, it's a classic example
of the logic of each side trying to win
and the end is they're a stalemate.
Both sides end up losing.
And actually in these situations it's
lose-lose-lose because the American people, our country
loses.
Our ability to work together to build
a country with good infrastructure,
with decent pay for people, with opportunity for everyone,
that's suffered a lot in this process,
as well as our ability to work together
to solve global problems be it climate change or anything.
And so we've paid a huge cost for it.
Essentially they've been playing a game of an eye for an eye
and we all go blind.
And so how do you change that?
It's partly process like things we're talking about.
It's also partly systemic.
I had the opportunity a number of years
ago to be a facilitator at what was billed
as a bipartisan congressional retreat.
It was held in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
There were about 200 members of Congress.
About 100 Republicans, 100 Democrats with their spouses
and so on.
And it was interesting to me that when you actually
got people together, first of all, we asked them questions.
We broke them to small groups.
Let's say we had maybe four, each group per conversation
we had four congressman from each side, about eight.
But I asked them, what's this like?
Why'd you go into politics in the first place?
And what's the toll of this kind of conflict?
And it was interesting, particularly
hearing from them and their spouses of just how unpleasant
and how contrary to whatever they'd hoped to do.
Because you spend a lot of time trying
to get into Congress, and then you can do nothing basically.
It's frustrating.
And it was interesting, a lot of them
said to me that they'd spent more time visiting with people
across the aisle on the train ride
from DC, because we were all on one train that got hired up
to Hershey, Pennsylvania, than they had in the previous four
years.
So to me it's partly about breaking down those walls.
But once they got talking with each other,
I could really see there was real potential.
One of the problems is that in the old days,
or what seems like the old days when
there was more kind of collaboration, cooperation,
it was partly because there were lot of informal relationships
that existed, partly because people
used to live more in Washington.
Now they live more in their own districts
and they fly back every Friday night.
When they used to live in Washington,
their kids went to the same schools, you know?
The Little League or whatever it was.
They got together.
And so one thing I've found is that informal time
where you can have cross-cutting relationships that aren't just
that you're a Democrat and that you're a Republican can
kind of humanize the situation.
Because right now it's descended into a lot
of blaming, a lot of finger pointing.
And this is where it goes back to getting to yes with yourself
which is more about, OK, taking responsibility for yourself.
I'd love to see people say-- like two spouses.
You can blame each other or you can say, look, I'm responsible.
I'm 100% responsible for our relationship.
And then other person's 100% responsible
for the relationship.
So the Democrats are 100% responsible
for the-- instead of just saying,
oh, it's all the Republican's fault.
Or the Republicans are 100% responsible for what's
going on.
And just a different modality.
And it may seem hard, but I've seen many examples
of bipartisan cooperation, starting with Ted Kennedy.
I mean, for example, he was a classic, you know,
liberal battler, but he also knew how to build bridges.
He always worked with Republicans.
It's been done before.
It can be done again.
And I'm hoping, back to your question, that now,
because of what you said, the Republicans,
now that they control both houses of Congress,
they're under a little pressure to deliver
because they've got to deliver.
They're not just the minority party anymore.
So they've got to deliver.
And they want to deliver.
And President Obama also, he wants to deliver too.
He's got two years left to accomplish his legacy.
And so I'd say there's an incentive now
if they can learn these methods of getting to yes, which
is instead of attacking each other,
attack the problem together.
Sit down, try and figure out what the incentives are.
That little exercise we just did about perceived injustice,
there's a lot of that going on.
When I talk to Democrats and Republicans they think,
oh, they stung us there.
We're going to sting them back.
That kind of gotcha game.
Everyone's got their black books.
We've got to learn to get beyond that.
BRIAN: OK, it was great, Bill.
Thank so much for coming.
WILLIAM URY: It was my pleasure, Brian.
[APPLAUSE]
BRIAN: Yep.
WILLIAM URY: It was great.
Yep, my pleasure.