William Ury:

…jumped me from the back, pulled out a big knife. We got a real problem here.

Ryan Hawk:

Whoa, the story. We live in an age of conflict. Actually go to the toughest spots in the world to help them negotiate.

We think of negotiation as talking, but really, true negotiation is listening. Buffett said, fine, $500 million deal, 30 second phone conversation. It was all because of trust.

What would you say are the toughest negotiations you’ve ever been a part of?

William Ury:

I devoted myself for 10 years to how do we reduce the risk of nuclear war. One of humanity’s and one of business’s biggest problems is how do we deal with our differences.

Ryan Hawk:

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text HAWK to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right.

You’ll also receive the first two chapters for free of my new book, The Score That Matters, if you text HAWK to 66866. Now, on to tonight’s featured leader, such a good one. William Ury is the co-author of Getting to Yes, the world’s all-time best-selling book on negotiation with more than 15 million copies sold and co-founder of Harvard’s program on negotiation. Bill has devoted his life to helping people, organizations, and nations transform conflicts around the world, having served as a negotiator in many of the toughest disputes of our times. He’s taught negotiation to tens of thousands and consulted for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, just to name a few.

He’s based in the mountains of Colorado, where he loves to hike. Bill is an internationally sought-after speaker and has two popular TEDx talks with millions of viewers. During this conversation, we discuss how to figure out what your life’s work is and then pursue it aggressively. Then Bill shares the three keys to achieving better outcomes in any negotiation. Ladies and gentlemen, notice the joy in Bill’s voice as he tells his stories.

These are wild. I’ve never heard anything like this, and yet he showed up with a giant smile. He’s laughing the entire time. He’s having so much fun, and I think that’s inspiring, and I think you’re gonna love this one. Please enjoy William Ury.

Bill, it is awesome to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. It’s a real pleasure, Ryan, a true pleasure to be on the show. So I wanna go back to a freezing night in January 1977. The phone rings.

It’s 10 o’clock at night. You’re living in a little rented room in the attic of an old wooden house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You’re 23 years old at the time, writing term papers and studying hard for your graduate school exams and social anthropology. You picked up the phone. What happens next?

William Ury:

Well, I was very startled because I heard the kind of gravelly voice said, hello, this is Professor Roger Fisher. I’ve just read your research paper on taking an anthropological view of the Middle East peace negotiations, and I thought it was interesting enough that I took the central charge and I sent it to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, who’s preparing right now for peace negotiations because I thought he might be interested. And I was speechless. I was floored. Roger went on to say, and I’d like you to come work with me.

First of all, you never got a call for professors, let alone on a weekend, let alone on a weekend night. And I never dreamed that an idea that I’d come up with in my head in that attic might be of possible use to an actual practitioner working on what was widely perceived as the world’s most difficult conflict. And I got hooked. That was it. I thought that creative ideas could be of use to people who are practitioners, who are in the trenches.

That was addictive. And I’ve spent the last 45 years wandering around the world, trying to help practitioners, myself being a practitioner, with being a student and a practitioner together, trying to answer this question, a lifelong question I’ve had ever since I was a boy, which is, isn’t there a better way to deal with our differences than putting the whole world at risk, essentially? Because I grew up under the shadow of the atomic bomb, and I thought there must be a better way. So I went into anthropology first, because I thought, well, maybe I should learn something about human beings. And then I really wanted to apply it, get out of the library.

So that’s how I got into the field of negotiation.

Ryan Hawk:

Wow, what was it about that paper that peaked? Because a lot of people were writing papers, and he chose yours, and he chose you to call. I mean, 23 years old, God, I was such an idiot. I can’t even imagine writing anything that anybody would want to read, let alone a really smart person who was working on a very hard problem.

What was it about that paper that made him call you?

William Ury:

Well, that’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not saying, I was pretty naive and went behind the ears, too. I just said, if I was like, I just did a little thought experiment. I often like to do thought experiments.

Like, okay, imagine I was a fly on the wall in the peace talks that were about to take place in Geneva, and I was an anthropologist. What would I notice? What would I see? It was just being a fly on the wall about the way in which people were negotiating. If things were going badly, people would be blaming each other, talking about the past.

And if things were going well, people would be talking about the future and what we can do tomorrow morning to try and bring the conflict to an end. And it was something simple like that. It was a little chart of just what would you notice behaviorally if you were a fly on the wall. And it wasn’t rocket science, but it was just simple common sense or maybe uncommon sense, really.

Ryan Hawk:

So what happened next?

Did you go fly to meet with him and to become part of this? What’d you do?

William Ury:

Yeah, I signed up. Signed me up. I mean, you get an offer like that in life, you seize it, carpe diem.

So I went to work with him on these different conflicts, with Roger Fisher, that is, and on the Middle East, on South Africa, on Northern Ireland, on the Cold War, whatever the hardest problems of the time were, the conflicts that seemed truly impossible. And Roger had a question that I always loved, which was, you got a problem, pick your decision maker and ask yourself what that decision maker could do tomorrow morning. Who could do what tomorrow morning to begin to alleviate this problem? Who could do what tomorrow morning? A very operational question of like, take all your ideas and put it down very operationally on what step could the president do or the secretary of state or the leader of a company, for that matter, do tomorrow morning that would begin to move things in a positive direction.

Ryan Hawk:

Wow. That’s one of the cool things I liked as I was digging into your work the past month is the fact that you are certainly a theory guy and are gonna write out your thoughts and you’re gonna study it, but then you are immediately gonna put it in play and practice. You’re gonna actually go to the toughest spots in the world to help them negotiate seemingly impossible problems and issues. And it felt like you decided to do that from age 23 and you’ve been doing it ever since. Can you share more about your philosophy to say, not only am I gonna study this and do research and write, but I’m gonna be in the middle and the thick of all of these toughest negotiations?

William Ury:

Yeah, it was, I went into anthropology and anthropology, which is interesting, anthropology was a discipline actually that led to the case study process at Harvard Business School. I mean, it was kind of like the idea behind anthropology is you are a participant and an observer at the same time. That the best way to learn something is not just to be the observer studying the beetle under the microscope, but to actually participate. You participate, anthropologists go and live in the cultures that they’re studying. So you combine that back and forth, you’re on the stage, you’re on the balcony, you’re on the stage, you’re on the balcony.

And that dialectic, that back and forth between theory and practice, I find is the most useful one for producing the most useful, powerful frameworks that can really perhaps be of use to us in trying to deal with what is humanities, one of humanities and one of business’s biggest problems, which is how do we deal with our differences? How do we deal with our conflicts? How do we negotiate? How do we get to agreement when there are a lot of different points of view?

Ryan Hawk:

Can you think of an example in those earlier days of when you went and became both an observer and a participant in like a moment, like an inflection point in your career and your life to say, oh my gosh, this is wild that I’m actually in the thick of it doing it like in an actual time?

William Ury:

Well, I can tell you it was hard to get into a Middle East peace negotiation as a graduate student. So I was looking around and I got an opportunity from a professor who was visiting Harvard at the time who was an arbitrator in the coal mines in Appalachia in Kentucky. And he knew a lot about arbitration and he’s gotten a call from the National Union and the National Employers Association saying we’ve got a real problem here. There’s this mine where the miners are always going out on strikes, wildcat strikes against the contract. The judge jailed the workforce for a night because there were so many injunctions that were broken.

There are bomb threats. People are packing guns. We’re afraid that this thing is going to explode into a nationwide coal strike, which will paralyze the economy. And so he said, could you come with me? And I said, I’d be delighted.

I always wanted to get my hands dirty.

Ryan Hawk:

Delighted? What an opportunity, huh?

William Ury:

Yeah, a real opportunity that I wanted to practice this. I wanted to see how it’s done.

And we flew down to Kentucky to this coal mine and the managers and the union leaders wouldn’t even sit in the same room together. That’s how bad things were. They would not even meet with each other. And so we shuttled, Steve Goldberg was his name. We shuttled back and forth between management and union over the six weeks.

And we finally brought some ideas that we thought that they would, that were their ideas because we’re listening. That’s the key thing in negotiation is to listen and see what are those opportunities? Where are those little possibilities that people may miss? We put them together. They agreed to come together because they saw there was enough there on the table.

And in two days, they were able to reach an agreement. And it was like a peace agreement. It was like champagne, you know what I mean? There were like 10 union leaders, 10 managers in a room and they all signed it as if they were signing a peace treaty. And then there was just one little detail, which was the agreement, of course, had to be ratified by the miners.

And there was a vote. Everyone assumed it was a formality, a vote a week later. And it was nearly unanimous in rejecting the very agreement that we had just painfully negotiated. Why? Even though the agreement on paper was much better than what they had, they didn’t trust management.

There was no trust there. Trust is one of those essential things is in leadership and in negotiation. And they thought anything that management signed, there must be a trick. So it’s just safer to reject it. And so we were back to square one.

So my first attempt was a bust. It was a failure, but that’s where you learn. You learn from the failures. I’ve learned from a lot of failures over my life. And that led to me, instead of like giving up at that point, which a lot of people were prepared to do, I said, no, if the problem is trust, I’m gonna move down to this coal mine.

And I spent the whole summer down at the coal mine a few months and I couldn’t get the miners at first to talk to me because I looked like more like a manager coming from Boston, coming from Harvard, whatever. And so I said, okay, I gotta go down in the mine. And the mine manager was a little reluctant to let me go down, but he said, you’re taking your life in your hands. And sure enough, I went down a mile down in the coal mine and you can’t even stand up in the coal mine. It’s like, and you can’t, there’s no lights.

You got this little light on your helmet and the dust is thick and the noise is infernal from the machines and no bathrooms, of course, and everyone’s chewing tobacco and spitting it everywhere. And, but there the miners had time to talk and I was down in their element and they were prepared to tell me about what their complaints were, what their gripes were, what was going on. And I started to make some progress. But if I could just tell you one other story, I don’t know, I don’t want to go on too long here, but there was one story that really goes to your question of like getting really in the thick of it was my third time down in the mine, out of the blue, I was talking to a miner and these four big burly coal miners in the dark jumped me from the back and wrestled me down to the ground, pulled out a big knife, rusty knife. I could just see it in my headlight, pulled out my pants and then took a weapon.

Thankfully, they just, they cut some, this is a mining hazing ritual. I didn’t know about called herring where they cut your pubic hair. And boy, was I relieved. But the amazing thing was as soon as that happened, the word spread like wildfire through the coal mine. And they said, now you’re a regular coal miner just like us, you’ve been hared.

And that began to build trust. And slowly I began to build trust. Slowly I was able to convince the miners to take their disputes instead of walking out, to talk them out with management and slowly enough, the strikes came to an end.

Ryan Hawk:

Whoa, what a story, man. So it feels like regardless of profession or even where you are in the world, and maybe I’m simplifying this too much.

So correct me if I’m wrong. People want to feel heard. They want to see that you care for them, that you care to listen to them. And that deal didn’t get done until you yourself did the necessary hard work, which wasn’t overnight, to actually listen to their concerns, to their needs, to almost become one of them for a period of time. Thus, maybe lowering their walls to say, hey, I kind of like this guy.

He’s listening to us. He cares for us. He wants the best for us. And by doing that, that was the way in order to get this deal done.

William Ury:

That’s it.

You’ve got it, Ryan. We think of negotiation as talking. And we say, they’re holding talks. But really, true negotiation is listening. There’s a saying that we’ve got two ears and one mouth for a reason.

It’s to listen twice as much as we talk, even more so. And that’s what I’ve found is that the best negotiators I know, they’re not necessarily the best talkers. They’re the best listeners. Because by listening, by putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, you figure out what is it they want? What is it that they’re afraid about?

What are their concerns? And so you’re much more likely to be able to persuade them to do what you want to do if you understand them first. And I mean, it’s elementary in one sense. But it’s amazing how much we overlook that simple lesson that listening is maybe the cheapest concession you can make in any negotiation. It costs you almost nothing.

It benefits you in all kinds of ways. And it shows respect. That’s another thing. A lot of negotiation is about showing respect, just seeing the other person, hearing them. It turns out to be it’s the key in human relationships.

It’s the key in leadership. It’s the key in negotiation.

Ryan Hawk:

Are there any times when you would say, based on either a person or people involved, that you’re like, I’m not dealing with them. I’m not going to work with them. They’re not doing this in good faith.

Maybe they have, I don’t know, some selfish tendencies, or they’re narcissists, or some really tough things. I got to believe you’ve had to deal with these types of people before, though, so now that I think about it. I’m just curious if there are any times that you walk away and say, nah, that’s not happening. I’m not doing it. Or you say, there’s always a way.

I will find a way. I’ll find a way, regardless of how bad one of the actors is in this negotiation.

William Ury:

That’s a good question. I mean, the answer to that question is both and. When you’re dealing with those kind of people, first of all, I would say one of the most important things in any negotiation, be it small in the office or large war situation, is preparation.

You put yourself, as in anything, you put yourself at a big disadvantage if you don’t prepare and learn about who the other side is. And if you can’t even talk to other people who’ve dealt with them and so on, and you’ll learn, in fact, it’ll sum up that that person’s kind of a narcissist, or they’re impossible to deal with, or that they deal in bad faith, because people’s reputation gets around. And then in a negotiation, when you’re on the balcony, the proverbial balcony, where you’re kind of looking at the situation from afar, as you are when you’re preparing, the first thing to think is, what do I really want here? What is it? What’s my interest?

Not just what I think I want, but what’s underneath it? What’s really the most important thing to me? And then, this is the all-important question, is before you go to negotiation, think through this question. What am I going to do to pursue my interests, to get what I need, if I cannot reach agreement with the other side? In other words, what, in negotiation lingo, Roger Fisher and I coined this in Getting to Yes, it’s called your BATNA, your best, it’s an acronym, stands for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

And it’s basically your best course of action, if you can’t reach agreement. You’re going to need that in any case, because that gives you confidence to know that you’ve got a plan B. But particularly in dealing with a narcissist, you might have to resort to your plan B. And so knowing your BATNA turns out to be key to giving you its confidence, its power. A lot of the power in the negotiation depends on who has a stronger BATNA, as it were. But it’s really important when it comes to dealing with the situations that you mentioned, because sometimes you do need to walk out or walk away.

You don’t have to walk away in a huff. You just say, look, it seems to me that the way we’re negotiating is not going to lead to the kind of agreement that I think we both want. We’re ready to negotiate any time you are. Here’s our phone number. Contact us when you’re ready.

Sometimes you need to do that. Having a strong BATNA actually increases the odds that you can actually reach an agreement. Respect, back and forth. They see that they’re not going to be able to put one on, put one over you.

Ryan Hawk:

So I’ve been given the advice when negotiating for either a job offer and compensation or whatever is going to go with that, or you could even throw in like buying a car.

I know this is a little bit different than what you write about and talk about, but I’m still curious. So I have to ask. And they’ve said, he who cares the least wins. Meaning, whoever is most open to walking away. Meaning, I don’t care if we get a deal done.

I’m open to walking away if you’re not going to give me the money or the title or the options that I want for the job offer. I’m not buying this car for whatever price. And I’ll walk away, and I genuinely won’t care, so I care the least. So I will walk away. That gives me the leverage to win a negotiation.

Now, I have some thoughts on this. I’m not going to share that. I want you to share your thoughts on what you think about those thoughts.

William Ury:

I would say that’s half right. OK, OK.

It’s half right in the sense of it’s BATNA. It’s in other words, who needs a deal more, right? Yeah, yeah. If you’ve got a strong BATNA, you don’t need the deal as much. If someone else has a weak BATNA, they don’t have such a good alternative.

They need it more. So that will affect the psychology. That’s true. Caring, this kind of attitude like, I don’t care.

Ryan Hawk:

Yeah.

William Ury:

First of all, it may not be authentic to you. You do care. We do care. I had a friend who was a negotiator, a well-known negotiator, also a well-known author. His name was Herb Cohen.

His phrase was, care, but not too much. And so you do both. And the other thing is, yeah, if you’re buying a car, it may be a one-shot deal, right? There is more of a kind of transactional, more money for them is less money for you and whatever. In life, what I’ve found is that almost all of our negotiations when I ask people are with people with whom we have ongoing relationships.

It’s our colleagues, our co-workers, our business partners, our suppliers. It’s our clients. It’s our customers, you name it. And like in a marriage, for example, if you ask the question, who’s winning this marriage? Your marriage is in serious difficulty.

If you ask the question, who’s winning the sales or manufacturing, you’re going to get your companies in trouble. If you’re asking, who’s winning me or my business partner? So I would say winning, and that’s what we tried to do in getting yeses, needs to be redefined as winning means getting what you want, and you can get what you want. And at the same time, if you’re creative and you’re a good listener, the other side may well be able to get what they need too. So maybe the most important choice we make is what game are we playing here?

I mean, if it’s football, OK, we lose. But if it’s like we’re trying to get along and work together and we’re interdependent, then you might want to think about redefining it as a situation where you can both actually get your needs met, because that makes for longer term relationships that are immensely more profitable in the long run. It makes me think so much of Warren Buffett.

Ryan Hawk:

It’s how he’s built his entire business in life. And he’s quoted as saying, he doesn’t try to win or get everything he can get from every negotiation.

In fact, he’ll say the opposite. He’ll say, you should leave a little bit. Leave some more out there. You want it to be a great deal for both sides to be a great deal for both sides, because that becomes your reputation. And people then want to do deals.

They trust to do deals with the type of person who’s not going to try to grab every single little penny from every single deal. You become known as a person like, yes, that’s you want to work with Warren. You want to work with those types of people who want the deal genuinely to be great for both sides.

William Ury:

Absolutely. And I had the immense fortune when I was a little bit older than that conversation with Roger Fisher to actually have Warren, somehow he found out about my work and said, I’d like to support this work.

Because he was concerned as a business guy that, wait a minute, we can make money here. But if the world goes kaput, if we have an atomic war. So I had some ideas about how to prevent a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And he backed me. And very much that same philosophy of like, I’m going to trust you.

And I said, do you want reports on the grant, the gift that he was giving for the work? He said, no, no, just write me a letter in six months. Let me know how you’re doing. Maybe come out to Omaha and see me. But it was very much that attitude of, I’m going to trust you and let you do your business.

And that’s what he does with his business units and his business heads. I remember actually once he said he had a deal where he was, people are always looking for efficiency in negotiation. It takes so long and whatever it is. But efficiency comes because you’ve invested beforehand like Warren Buffett in trust, in your reputation as being trustworthy and your ability to trust others. And-

Ryan Hawk:

Trustworthy, trustwilling, right?

William Ury:

Yeah, you got it. And he had a business partner, Murphy, Charles Murphy, I think who was the owner of Cap Cities USA. And Cap Cities USA wanted to buy ABC, the network. And Warren was going to put up $500 million. And they had, at some point, it looked like the deal was coming through. So Murphy called up Buffett and said, Warren, it looks like the deal is going to go through.

What do you want in return for your $500 million investment? And Buffett said to him, Murph, I don’t know. You’ve thought about it more than I have. What do you think is a fair deal here? And Murphy said, well, it would be this much stock for that much amount of money.

And Buffett said, fine, $500 million deal, 30-second phone conversation, very profitable for both sides. ABC was later sold to Disney at a big profit for both sides. And it was all because of trust. Yeah. Worked because it didn’t matter who made the first offer.

Both partners realized the other would take the other side into account. And so when people are looking and say, oh, these negotiations, disputes, they take so long. You invest in, just like you invest in business processes, you invest in the relationship, in trust, in your reputation for being trustworthy. And you can then operate at the speed of trust.

Ryan Hawk:

Yeah.

I know Jim Collins is one of your good buddies, hiking partners out there in Colorado. And I just heard his voice through that, right? Make the trust wager, which he learned from his mentor, Bill Lazier, and they wrote a book together. And that’s really altered how I try to approach all relationships is this trustworthy and trustwilling leading with trust. You don’t have to earn it.

You’ve got it. Even though I know other people will make me earn it. That’s fine. But from my perspective, you’ve got it. Now you get burned every once in a while.

People will take advantage of you every once in a while. I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth living that way to be trustwilling and give it before anybody’s earned it. Even if you get burned every once in a while, because I found, I’m sure you have too, Bill, it attracts the type of people I want to be around when they say that’s a trustworthy and trustwilling guy. And that’s a fun way to live, man.

That is a much more enjoyable way to live than to being skeptical and a cynic and say, I don’t know, you’re going to take six months to earn my trust. Now you got it. Now, if you burn me, we’re going to probably have some issues. But outside of that, you’ve got it. And it just feels like it’s attracted really quality clients and good people in my direction from living that way for a while.

And I learned that from your buddy, Jim.

William Ury:

That’s great. And that’s exactly it. And that’s my experience. It’s funny because negotiation is sometimes associated with doing kind of like shading the line on the truth and manipulating and maybe using some tricks here and there.

The interesting thing, Brian, is that over these decades, the most successful negotiators I know, people like Warren Buffett would be a good example or Chip for that matter. And what they prize most is their reputation for being trustworthy and trustworthy sense. And why is that? Because, yeah, you can get burned every once in a while, but once you have that reputation, people are going to want to do deals with you. Then when people do sit down with you, they’re going to actually tell you what they really want, what they’re really concerned about.

Yeah. You don’t have to play games. It’s so much faster. Exactly. Like that conversation between Murphy and Buffett, 30 seconds. You’ll save time, but you will be able to optimize the deals because so much in negotiation, we leave gold on the table.

We leave so much potential joint gain where we could help each other a lot more, only if we would share with each other what we need, what we really want and so on. And so you’ll optimize your relationships, optimize your deals. You’ll make them more efficient. And so ethically, it feels better inside of you, but practically it pays off. And that’s why the most successful negotiators I know, the thing they prize their most is that reputation for honesty and fair deal.

Ryan Hawk:

I love prompts. I love questions. And I found some of the most impactful leaders ask great questions. And again, referring back to Jim Collins, he asked you a question one day, I believe it was on one of your hikes. And I’d love for you to answer it here while we’re talking, or at least we can talk through it.

And one of those questions he asked you, there’s a few of them and I may get to more than one. And that is this. If you had to boil your life’s work, life’s work, I love that. If you had to boil your life’s work down to just one sentence you could leave behind, what would it say? That was the question that led to this book.

William Ury:

Because that was it. And I looked at it, we were on this hike, it was a beautiful autumn day and the hike up in the mountains. And he asked me that question and I was totally said, well, yeah, I said, you’ve been wandering around the world for about 45 years here in the world’s conflicts. The world’s, if you look around, there’s a lot of conflict in the world today. We live in an age of conflict.

And that was true three or four years ago when we had that conversation, but it’s even more true right now today, 2024. And what could you say that could be of use to people now? And so I went away and I thought about it. I love simplicity. I love that kind of challenge.

And he said to me, even to like he said, you think it’s hard? Darwin could do it. And he gave me a page on the origin of species where Darwin summed up the entire theory of evolution in one sentence. And so I like challenges. And so I went away and on our next hike, a couple of months later, I tried out a sentence on him and we worked on it or whatever.

And then he said, now go write the book. Once you got it down to one sentence, write the book. And that’s really what produced this book. And the sentence, if I could just unpack it for, you want me to unpack it? Oh yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Let me just start off by saying people left after all these years of wandering around working in some of the world’s most impossible conflicts. People ask me often, are you still an optimist after all these years? Are you a pessimist? And of course I’m an optimist in one sense.

That’s what you need to really do these things. But I prefer to give a different answer. Now I say I’m a possible list. In other words, I believe in human possibility and human potential. All these conflicts, they’re not external forces.

It’s not an asteroid hitting the earth. They’re human-made. They’re made by humans and it can be solved by humans. So however difficult and impossible the conflict looks like, it’s made by humans. It can be unpacked by humans.

And I believe in that because I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes so many times, whether it’s race war in South Africa or a sectarian war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or guerrilla war, civil war for 50 years in Columbia. I’ve watched as these seemingly impossible conflicts have gotten transformed. So what I said to Jim was, as I think about it, there’s three big openings that you have in conflict. The problem is we think too small. When you get into conflict, we think too small.

In fact, sometimes the bigger the conflict, the smaller we think. And we need to think bigger. We need to think bigger here. So the first thing actually, when you’re involved in a negotiation or conflict is not to think about how I’m going to get the other side to do what I want them to do. The first negotiation that we face is with ourselves.

That’s what I’ve learned over like 45 years is that the biggest obstacle to me getting what I want in a negotiation is not that difficult person on the other side of the table. It’s the person on this side of the table. It’s me. It’s the person I look at in the mirror every morning. That’s our own human, very natural, understandable tendency to react, to act without thinking.

As the saying goes, when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret. And that happens. So that was the first thing I said to him was the first thing we got to do. And this is something we need to do today’s times more than ever with social media and AI and everything like that is we need to, I use the metaphor of go to the balcony. In other words, we need to start by stopping.

Imagine you’re negotiating on a stage and then you go to a mental and emotional balcony overlooking that stage. It’s a place where you can keep your eyes on the prize. What is truly, truly important to you? What’s the purpose here? And then how are you going to get there?

What’s the bigger picture? So that’s the first thing I said to him was we were hiking up in the mountains and I said, look down at the valley. You can see forever. We’ve got the view from the balcony. That’s what we need nowadays more than ever is we need perspective.

We’ve lost perspective in this country. We’ve lost perspective in this world. And so the first thing is to realize that dealing with conflict, dealing with negotiation is an inside job. It starts right here.

Ryan Hawk:

There’s also a golden bridge.

I’m leading you here, but I’m curious. So you got to go up to the balcony, right? And then we find this golden bridge. Can you bring that metaphor home?

William Ury:

I like these metaphors as you can tell.

I was looking at Jim and I was saying, Jim, let’s imagine there’s another peak over there. There’s a huge chasm valley between us and the other peak. Imagine that chasm is you’re here and I’m way over there and you want me to come over to where you are, but it’s really hard to do because there’s this huge valley. It’s like a Grand Canyon. It’s filled with doubt, anxiety, hostility, distrust, all the things in conflict, unmet needs, fear of looking weak.

Am I going to look weak? So it’s very hard for the other side to move where you want them to move. What we need to do, and this is not easy in any kind of conflictual situation is we need to leave where our mind is for a moment. We leave where our problem is and we got to move over to the other side, put ourselves in their shoes, start the conversation from where they are, where their concerns are, and then proceed to build them a bridge. I called it golden bridge.

It comes from Sun Tzu. They wrote the art of war 2,500 years ago, that phrase. In other words, an attractive way, a golden bridge over that chasm to where you want them to be. So we have to actually, instead of making it harder for them, which is what we do in conflict, we try to make it harder for them. No, you got to think, how do I make it easier for them?

How do I make it easier for them to make the decision I’d like them to make? It’s a different mindset. It’s a shift in mindset. And that’s what we need in dealing with the tough conflicts we face today.

Ryan Hawk:

One of the cool stories about the pause and being calm and being, instead of reacting, being proactive as you write about, I’m going to pronounce his name wrong, but maybe you can correct me and then tell this guy’s story.

Vasili Arkhipov and the sub B-59. Can you share that story?

William Ury:

Yeah, well, for a long time, I worked back in the Cold War on how to reduce the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union. And of course…

Ryan Hawk:

Hold on for a second.

Can you pause? Do you ever just think of that sentence you just said? And it’s like, I literally worked on helping us not have the world end. That’s what I’ve done for years of my life. Isn’t that wild to say?

I mean, that’s what you actually did.

William Ury:

Yeah, I did. I mean, but I want to be humble about this. You only can do so much. You don’t have to be humble.

Ryan Hawk:

You just say what you did.

William Ury:

Yeah, but that’s true. I did. And I worked with the US government and I was obsessed with that. I couldn’t understand why we live in this most amazing age of opportunity and new technology and technological genius and the possibility for abundance.

And at the same time, we’ve used our technological genius. We’ve come up with ways to destroy the planet. So I thought there’s got to be a better way to deal with this. So I devoted myself for 10 years to this project of how do we reduce the risk of nuclear war? And it meant working in Washington, going over to Moscow, trying to put myself in the Soviet shoes, whatever it is.

But the one thing, the one crisis that we studied a lot was the Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact, even my colleagues at Harvard and I, there was one occasion where we brought together the surviving participants 25 years later of, I mean, the leaders, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrew Gomiko, and the Cubans to say what happened. But going back to that story you just mentioned is at the height of that crisis, when the world was teetering on nuclear war, it was October 1962, there was a Soviet sub out in the North Atlantic, and there was an American destroyer tracking it because everything was on edge. And the American destroyer had orders to track it. And so they decided, well, we’ve got to make it easier to track, so we’ll force it to come to the surface.

So they dropped depth charges on top of the sub to force it to the surface. Now, for the Soviets inside that sub, they didn’t know that those were just a warning. It was like, they said, it was like being in a washing machine. I mean, it’s just like going around and around and around and around. And unbeknownst to the Americans, that Soviet sub was armed with a nuclear torpedo.

And unbeknownst to the Americans, Moscow had authorized that the top three commanders of the sub could decide without even hearing from Moscow to use that nuclear torpedo in self-defense. Well, the thing is going around, and the commanding officer says, arm the nuclear torpedo, we’ll sink, but we’ll sink that ship too. We’ll defend the honor of the Soviet Navy. And the second, the guy who was a deputy captain said, shit, look at that. And then there was a third guy who was the third guy who needed to say yes to that, who said, no.

He paused for a moment and he said, no, we’re not going to do that right now. And they looked, oh, what are you talking about? And he said, look, the regulations say that you could only use the nuclear torpedo if the wall of the sub is materially breached. That hasn’t happened. And he said, no, everyone got furious at him, but he said, no, and everyone calmed down.

Robert McNamara, when he found out about this, he said, if that nuclear torpedo had gone, which it almost went, we would have had to retaliate with nuclear and that would have led to nuclear war. So for one man who was able to go to the balcony, keep us cool, keep us calm, Vasily Arkhipov, that’s why we’re even able to have this conversation because probably there, who knows where there’d be a world. I mean, certainly hundreds and hundreds of millions of people would have died, all saved by this one man, Vasily Arkhipov, who went to the balcony, paused, which is exactly what we need to learn in today’s times.

Ryan Hawk:

Such a good story. I’m just gonna ask you to tell some of these stories that I read that I know you’ve told before, but I love, and I had not heard them prior to all of my research.

So the old woman and the camels and talking about the three victories on the path to possible, can you share the story about the wise old woman and the camels?

William Ury:

For sure, Ryan. It’s one of my favorite stories is an old negotiating story from the Middle East, actually, and about a man who dies and leaves to his three sons, 17 camels. That’s their inheritance. And to the oldest son, he leaves half the camels and to the youngest son, he leaves a third of the camels.

And to the youngest son, he leaves a ninth of the camels. Well, the three sons get into negotiation and it’s not so easy because 17 doesn’t divide by two and it doesn’t divide by three and it doesn’t divide by nine. And they get into a big quarrel about it and they’re about to get violent. And then in desperation, they go and they consult a wise old woman. And the wise old woman, like a good boss, thinks about their problem for a long time.

She says, well, I don’t know if I can help you. I really don’t. But if you want, I have a camel. You can have my camel. And the three sons look a little startled, but they say, okay.

And they take her camel and then they have 18 camels. Well, 18, as it turns out, does divide by two. So the first son takes his half and that’s nine. 18 does divide by three and the second son takes his third and that’s six. And 18 does divide by nine and the second son takes his ninth, which is two.

If you add nine and six, you get 15 plus two, 17. They have one camel left over. They give it back to the wise old woman. Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the negotiations that we engage in, which is, we start off with 17 camels. No way to resolve this issue.

It’s just impossible. Somehow what we need to do is take a step back to the balcony, like the wise old woman, get some perspective, look for some kind of creative idea here. It’s like, add a little resource, an 18th camel here. That’s the golden bridge. And oftentimes it takes, people are so into it, like these three sons, that it takes someone who’s around, who can help them, like this wise old woman, what I call a third side, which is, it could be a friend, an ally, a colleague or whatever, just someone who can help us go to the balcony, build that bridge.

Because it’s hard to do that in today’s times. So it takes those three key pillars, the three secret ingredients here to me of how you transform conflict, which is balcony, which is the work we do to unlock the potential within us, bridge, which is what we do to unlock the potential between the parties. And then the third side, which is the potential that exists around the parties. So it’s like first dimension, second dimension, third dimension, you put all three together and you unlock full human potential to deal with these really tough ornery problems that we face at every level from home to work to the world.

Ryan Hawk:

What would you say are one or two of the toughest negotiations you’ve ever been a part of, where you had many thoughts to say, this is not going down.

It’s not going to happen. I don’t know. And maybe you can share a time when it didn’t work as well as a time when it did. But I’m thinking of just real life examples of when you take these ideas and theories and you put them into practice because that’s what you do. And that’s what you’ve done and what you continue to do.

What are some real life examples of like, oh God, this was not going to happen as well as ones that the good and the bad of those results?

William Ury:

Well, yeah, there’s a lot of failures and a lot of challenges along the way. And I would say that’s what I try to do is, you know, I’m an anthropologist, but I’m trying to actually test these things out. Like, okay, let’s see if this works. If it works in the hardest situations, it maybe has a chance to work in the easier situations.

So that’s why I like to go to where, the heart of darkness, to where it’s really impossible. Why I’ve worked so long in the places like the Middle East and so on. I would say one conflict that comes to mind was, some years ago, I was involved as a facilitator between Russia, the government of Russia, and the government of Chechnya, which was an independent republic or wanted to be independent. And there was a war going on. And this was before Putin.

This was Yeltsin. And we came to, you know, there was a meeting. I wasn’t the only one. I was a facilitator, but there were a bunch of people in The Hague, in the peace palace in The Hague. And Yeltsin sent his national security advisor and the vice president of Chechnya was flying in.

But when they took off in their plane, they were surrounded by MiGs and forced down. And so they arrived, when they finally did arrive, they arrived in a very disgruntled mood. And the vice president, you’re meeting there in the same room where the war crimes tribunal was taking place for Yugoslavia. And so the vice president pointed his finger at the Russian. He said, you guys are going to stay here because you’re going to be on trial for war crimes.

And he went on for an hour, an hour and a half, the whole history of Chechnya, how the people had suffered so much over centuries from Russian oppression. And, you know, he was just like winding up. And then he looked at me and said, oh, you’re an American. You Americans, you guys are on the other side. You’re supporting, your president Clinton is supporting Boris Yeltsin.

And besides which you’re oppressing the people of Puerto Rico. And what are you going to say about that? He turned to me, I was there, we were sitting in a circular table, about 30 people around the circular table and had been a long day. And I thought, what do I know about Puerto Rico? But thankfully, I was able to just like, maybe use the translation time to like go to the balcony for a moment and just get some perspective and say, what are we here for?

That’s what you want on the balcony. And so I paused for a moment. There was a little bit of silence and silence is one of your biggest tools in negotiation incidentally. Just don’t worry. Just take a little bit of silence.

It’s not the end of the world. In fact, there’s a good study correlating the amount of silence there is in a negotiation with the amount of cooperative outcomes there are. Because people need some time to think. So I took a little bit of silence. Everyone was looking at me.

And then I said to him, well, I hear the stories about your people and how they’ve suffered and anyone has to just feel for that. And that’s what we’re here to do is try to figure out how to stop the suffering. And I take your question, your criticism of my country as a sign that we’re among friends and we can talk very candidly to each other. So I appreciate that. And what we’re here to do is to think about how to stop the suffering in Chechnya.

And then move the conversation back to the guy nodded. I’d heard him. I heard his story. And I just found a way to just kind of like divert the question back now. And then the next day, he was handing me a ceremonial Chechen sword as a gift of like it was a silver sword with a finely cooled scabbard as a thank you from the Chechen people.

So he’d switched. At the same time, you have those little breakthroughs, but there was a ceasefire, but then the ceasefire broke down. We helped them negotiate a little bit of a ceasefire. And in the end, it dissolved into another war again and a whole bunch of stories. But you could just feel it.

I mean, it’s like you do your best. You try to do this. But in the end, thousands of people died. There was a war. And so the situation didn’t end prettily.

But even in those situations, you look for those little ways to move forward.

Ryan Hawk:

You called yourself earlier a possibilist. And in your book, you say a possibilist’s core value is humble audacity. Can you share more about humble audacity and being a possibilist?

William Ury:

Yeah.

A possibilist is someone who, whenever you see obstacles, acknowledges the obstacles and looks for the opportunities. Like my grandfather came to this country, 14 without a dime in his pocket, started washing windows. Ten years later, he’s washing whole buildings, facades of buildings. Ten years after that, he’s cleaning out steel mills. I once asked my uncle, what was his secret?

He said, you know, where others saw obstacles, he saw opportunities. And that’s really what we need to bring, that mindset to bring to bear to conflicts is to see where are the opportunities. So a possiblist is not just Pollyannish looking. You look at the negative possibilities, like nuclear war or whatever lawsuit, and then you look for the positive possibilities. And it’s the mindset, I think, that we need in today’s times in whatever we’re in business, we’re in a leader of any kind.

We need to bring that perspective because there’s no limit to how much we can achieve. We can solve problems and create incredible prosperity if only we can learn to work together. And the thing that’s in the way is this destructive conflict. I’m a possiblist. I believe we can work through that destructive conflict because it’s made by humans.

It can be solved by humans.

Ryan Hawk:

That story you wrote about your grandfather, Eddie, that is worth buying the book alone. Just learning about him and what he built is so cool. It also reminds me of the story of the two shoe salesmen. I don’t know if it’s true.

It doesn’t matter. It’s still a good story. So anyway, there’s a leader of these two guys that he’s going to send to a foreign country to sell shoes. And he sends both of them to the same country, but different parts, but roughly the same type of people into this country. And they both get sent there.

And once they get there, one guy goes up and he notices that nobody in the whole country, nobody he sees is wearing shoes. And the other guy notices the exact same thing. And they both come back to tell their boss after they had traveled back from their journey to sell shoes. And the first guy says, boss, this is awful. This is terrible.

There is no way we’re going to sell a single pair of shoes. They don’t wear shoes in that country. And the other guy comes back and said, boss, this is the most target-rich environment I’ve ever seen. What an opportunity. Nobody has any shoes.

I’m going to sell everybody shoes. And it just showed the two different ways that people look at opportunities or not. And that I would probably place a bet in my money on the guy who comes back and says, oh my goodness, what an opportunity to sell all these guys shoes when the other one said, no, they don’t wear shoes. And that feels like your grandfather, Eddie, is the fact that that’s the way he approached it. And I feel like I want to inspire and encourage more people to be like that, to be like you, to be like your grandfather, Eddie.

I think if more people thought that way, we’d all probably be better off.

William Ury:

Absolutely, Ryan. And I sense that in your show and the people you bring on the show is, you’re all naturally possibleists. And what I’m saying right now is, we can realize those possibilities if we can bring that same mindset to human conflict. We’re not victims of human conflict.

We can transform it. We’re not going to get rid of it. Conflict is healthy, it’s natural, and it could even be healthy. We might even need more of it in the sense to bring about changes. But the key choice that we have is to transform it, to change the form from destructive fighting into constructive, creative, dialogue, listening, negotiation.

Ryan Hawk:

Two things before we run, man. This is so cool. It’s flown by. First, from the second we connected on this Zoom, before we hit record, you have not stopped smiling. You have this way about you that seems joyful and you are living your best life.

So I have to ask, how do I do that, man? How do I become more like that? Where does that come from that you seem to be so joyful and happy? You’ve been laughing throughout the conversation. Where does that come from?

How do you conjure that up?

William Ury:

I don’t know. But I would say that it comes from taking whatever worries me and turning towards it and playing with it. Turning towards it? Turning towards it.

In other words, if you’ve got a problem, you’ve got an obstacle, we tend to resist and avoid. And what I’ve learned is, I remember reading when I was a young man, a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that said, the wisest advice you ever heard given to a young person was, always do what you’re afraid to do. Turn towards it. In other words, turn towards it and then bring the spirit of play because play brings out our full potential. When we play sports, we play music.

It’s our full potential. And that’s what we’re going to need in dealing with these seemingly impossible challenges that we face in today’s era. But if we can do that, if we can bring that spirit, if we can bring that full potential, if we can bring, sometimes conflict, oh, it’s serious. You got to be deadly serious. What I’ve found in these situations is actually a little bit of humor, but also just a little bit of play brings out people’s best.

People relax. We’ve got something hard to do, begin by relaxing. It’s a paradoxical, but that actually, I think, tapping into the human capacity for full potential, for play, for creativity, for curiosity, for collaboration will enable us to transform any conflict so that we can realize the world that we want for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

Ryan Hawk:

It’s inspiring, man, just as a way to operate, as a way to move through life, to see somebody who feels like you’ve got that figured out. And you’ve seen some stuff, man.

You’ve seen some stuff in your life. And to say, to not be a cynic and not be a skeptic from all the stuff you’ve seen. In fact, to be the exact opposite end of the spectrum, that is inspiring. Like that is really, really cool. And I’m so glad we had a chance to have this conversation.

I would highly encourage people get Bill’s formal name, William. You’re the book though. So many good ones. The latest is called possible, how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict. Forward by Jim Collins, which is really good.

And then the stories packed throughout. I mean, the life you’ve lived, man, you’re still in the heart of doing all this stuff is wild. And the book really brings that out. And so I highly encourage people, even if you just want to be entertained, you’d read the book, but not only that, you’re going to be really informed. And then there’s going to be a great deal of practical application for whatever negotiations you’re dealing with.

And all of us are negotiating all the time. I mean, it’s one of the constants of life. And so I think the book possible by Bill is really good. And I’m just grateful for you, man, for being here. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.

William Ury:

I would love that, Ryan. I really enjoyed the conversation. I enjoy the way you listen, which that’s the key to negotiation. And so I wish all of your listeners much success in getting to yes and making the world the way we’d like it to be.

Ryan Hawk:

Love it.

Thank you so much, man. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are sending me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this awesome conversation with William Urie.

First, a few takeaways from my notes, your life’s work. If you had to boil your life’s work down to just one sentence, you could leave behind, what would it say? This is a great question for us to ask ourselves to gain clarity on our purpose and what we were put here to do. What is your life’s work? Next, be trustworthy and trust willing.

Become known as a person who trusts others first without making people earn it. Yes, you will get burned every once in a while, but I found it’s worth it. Leading with trust seems to attract the type of people that I want to be around. I think it will for you as well. This first came from Jim Collins and Bill Lazier years ago and it’s changed how I approach relationships and the type of people that I’ve attracted to my orbit.

I really enjoy this. Next, bring your spirit of play. That’s one of the things about Bill that I couldn’t help but notice and brought up towards the end of our conversation. From the very second that we connected, he was smiling, laughing, enjoying himself the entire time. He’s having fun.

I’m thinking, yeah, what’s the point of doing all this if we don’t have some fun along the way? Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Bill Ury. I think it will help you become a more effective leader because you do that and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcast and you subscribe and you write a review and you rate the show, hopefully five stars. You are spreading the message and that gives me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis and for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much.

Talk to you soon. Can’t wait.