Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Welcome to this very special edition of ABC Legal. Now if you’re a regular listener to the show, you might wonder, why am I speaking English on the Norwegian podcast? Well, the reason for this is quite simple. You see, we have a very special guest on the show today joining us from the United States. And today’s episode is dedicated to the art of negotiations and with us today is one of the world’s absolute experts in this field.
He is what you might call a negotiations superstar. William Ury is an American author, academic, anthropologist, and negotiation expert. He co-founded the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School. And together with former US President Jimmy Carter, he co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. And former President Jimmy Carter once said about today’s guest that, Bill Ury has a remarkable ability to get to the heart of a dispute and find simple but innovative ways to resolve it.
Over the last 30 years, William has served as a negotiator, advisor, and mediator in conflicts ranging from corporate mergers to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. During the 1980s, he helped the US and Soviet governments to create a nuclear crisis center designed to avert an accidental nuclear war. In that capacity, he also served as a consultant to the crisis management center at the White House. More recently, William has served as a third party in helping to end the civil war in Aceh in Indonesia and has helped to prevent one in Venezuela. Last but not least, he has been heavily involved in the process of getting to peace in Colombia.
Back in 1981, together with the late Roger Fisher, he was the co-author of the classic title Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Getting to Yes has been translated into more than 30 languages and is widely recognized as THE book on negotiation. The book Getting to Yes Alone has changed the way countless people negotiate at home, with our loved ones, at work, with their colleagues, and the way nations negotiate with each other. William Ury has trained tens of thousands of people on how to conduct constructive negotiations, and today he’s here to train and guide you in the art of negotiation. I am so humbled and grateful to welcome Mr. William Ury to ABC Legal, and we must of course start this interview with Colombia.
In November 2016, a revised agreement was signed between FARC and the Colombian government, and on the 10th of December, President Juan Manuel Santos will receive the Nobel Peace Prize here in Oslo, just a couple of hundred meters from where I’m sitting now. William, first of all, welcome to the show, and also congratulations on all the success of Getting to Peace in Colombia.
William Ury:
I think it’s a great pleasure to be on this podcast and to be speaking to your audience, and it’s been humbling to actually participate as an advisor in this process, to watch over the last five years, to watch a conflict that was widely regarded as impossible or intractable, a war that’s been going on for 52 years, to watch it slowly becoming possible, that one could end a war like that, and it’s still in process. It’s still a messy process, but it’s astonishing to see the progress, and a lot of it, I must say, has come with the help of your country, of Norway.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
That is just so great to hear.
Would you say that the Peace Prize also has helped in the finalization of the peace agreement?
William Ury:
It has, but Norway, from the very beginning, has served as a facilitator of the talks in Havana, played an extremely important role in witnessing and helping the talks get back together when they were coming apart a little bit, so Norway has played a very important role on the side of these talks.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Yeah, thank you for mentioning that, and I think actually that a lot of people listening to this podcast will be a bit surprised to hear that Norway had an active part in supporting and facilitating the negotiations in Colombia. But now I must ask you, since you’re here on the podcast, and I’ve just been so interested to hear this, with such a serious conflict as the one in Colombia, and of course as the many conflicts you’ve been involved in before, but now let’s turn to Colombia, where do one start when you try to get the parties together and try to talk together and try to negotiate an agreement in a war that has been going on for more than 50 years, which is the situation in Colombia with several hundred thousand casualties after all the violence? Where do one start?
William Ury:
Yeah, you know, this war in Colombia is actually, in the broader picture, it’s a series of wars, of interconnected wars all across Latin America that started in the 1960s that came out of the Cold War and came out of Marxist insurgencies in response to social injustice in this whole region. And the war in Colombia is the last one, actually. So it’s the end of a… So in that broader case, there have been hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million people have died in these wars that are now coming to an end with the war in Colombia. It’s also remarkable that this is the last war in the entire hemisphere, and that actually gives rise to the question of if it is possible for us as humanity to put an end to war in one hemisphere.
Is it possible? Is it conceivable to imagine putting an end to war in both hemispheres, namely in the entire world? So to me, it actually is a story of hope. Now where it all begins is, at least my involvement, I’ve been going to Colombia over the years a number of times, and I’m thinking of how impossible and tractable, but about five years ago I received an invitation from the Colombian government, specifically from President Santos to come and just talk with him about what we know from the ending of wars in other parts of the world. What are the best practices for ending wars?
And I’ve been privileged ever since for the last five years to serve as a small team of people who have had experience in wars around the world, whether it’s wars in the Middle East or wars in Northern Ireland, wars in Central America, to see if we can bring to bear what the lessons have been of ending those wars so that the Colombian peace process could benefit.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
William, this is very interesting, and it just makes me wonder, is there any lessons here that we can, and people listening to the podcast, can transfer to their daily lives?
William Ury:
Yes, a number of lessons. One is, very importantly, we began five years ago by asking the question, what is it that the other side really wants? Looking behind the positions that people take, what are their underlying interests?
What are their deepest needs? We tried to work, in some sense, it’s good to work from the end backwards. In other words, I asked the negotiators who were going to negotiate with the FARC in a very secret way initially, because the first phase of the talks were very confidential. I asked them, okay, let’s just imagine we’re at the end of this process, and we’ve reached an agreement. The leader of the FARC is making a speech explaining to his people, you’ve been fighting for 50 years, why are we agreeing to end the war, lay down our weapons?
What’s the speech that that person could give? What’s the speech, similarly, that the President of Colombia could give explaining to people why the war is coming to an end and how this is a victory for all of Colombia and all Colombians? Then we looked at, okay, so what were the key interests that need to be met? This is an exercise that anyone can do in any situation, whether it’s negotiating with your partner, negotiating with your boss, is to work from the end backwards and imagine that work backwards from those speeches, but is to ask this question of what do people actually want? One of the things we quickly came to the conclusion was, you can’t just surrender.
You can’t just say, look, okay, the war is over. You have to explain, there has to be a sense of honor, a sense of meaning that there was a reason for fighting for 50 years. For the FARC, in particular, it had to do with social justice. They fought initially on the issue of huge inequity, inequality, and land tenure. That was one thing.
Another had to do with power and political participation, that essentially they wanted to shape the politics of Colombia. We had to think, okay, so we built an agenda based on land reform. Let’s talk about, because the government also was interested in land reform, how can we reform the land and bring greater social justice to Colombia? How can we design mechanisms for greater amounts of political participation so that you don’t fight with bullets, you fight with ballots? You fight in the voting booth, but with democracy.
Then we looked at, okay, what other interests might they have? Security, of course. Security for them and their families and their people, because oftentimes, sometimes when these things happen, people get killed afterwards. In other words, we looked at what were the basic interests of the other side. Then we built an initial agenda of, okay, we have to address those basic interests.
To me, that agenda that they developed and that they developed with the other side in Havana in the first few months of the negotiations five years ago became the constitution of these negotiations over the last five years. Everything has been building from that initial agenda. To me, that’s the same thing in our own negotiations, is to always look behind the positions, the things people say they want. Why are you fighting? What is your core interest?
If someone, take a simple example, if someone goes in and they’re asking for a salary raise to their boss, why do you want the raise? Money is the position, but what’s behind that? Maybe it’s recognition. Maybe it’s equity that you feel that other people are being paid more for the same job. Maybe you have a health need, or you have some kind of financial need, or your child needs some help.
Think about what those underlying interests are. Once you can define it in terms of the underlying interests, then it becomes much more possible to come up with creative solutions that benefit both sides. Another one I might just mention, because you asked, is trust. So much of the … There was huge distrust between the government and the FARC, obviously when you’re fighting. There’s huge distrust in Colombia, that the distrust in fact blocks you from reaching an agreement, but the distrust in fact is created by the war, and in fact creates the pattern of war.
To me, one of the key challenges in any negotiation is how do you build trust with the other side? How can you do that? I’ll just give you a very small example, a story from early on in the Colombian negotiations that was a building of that confidence, because the question is, how do you do that? One of the government officials … We had to face the challenge of how do you extricate a guerrilla commander from the jungle to take them to Cuba in order to negotiate with them? Of course, they’re not going to want to tell you where they are in the jungle because they’re afraid that the military will get that information and they will bomb that place.
This is where you actually have to use third parties, and in this case, they used the Red Cross to communicate that information, but this friend of mine who works for the government, Jaime, he got in the helicopter together with the Red Cross official, who then handed … He rented a private helicopter because this all had to be done secretly without anyone knowing about it, and the Red Cross official hands the coordinates to the pilot. They fly out in the middle of the jungle, and they land the helicopter, and then slowly over the next half an hour, suddenly the guerrilla come out of the jungle, and they all have their AK-47s, hundreds of them, pointing the gun at the helicopter, and Jaime’s in the helicopter thinking, okay, so what do I do at this point, and saying, well, the helicopter, bullets can go through the helicopter, so he decides to get out of the helicopter, and he walks up to the commander, and he says, Comandante, I am now placing you under the personal protection of the president. That, to me, is kind of a negotiating move of like, okay, that’s what we call a reframe in the negotiation, because suddenly it looks like all the guns are aimed at him, and he’s saying, no, I’m putting you under the personal protection of the president, but it was also a question of trust. He made himself vulnerable. I might be killed, but then he invited the commander to get in the helicopter, and a lot of the guerrillas were saying, this is a trick, and the helicopter will fly you off to prison, but the commander decided to trust him, because he had trusted the commander, and the commander got in the helicopter, and they flew off to, eventually flew off to Cuba, and the negotiations began, but it all begins with an act of mutual trust like that, and I think the same lesson applies in our personal relationships. If we have a problem with our spouse, or our children, or our business colleague, a lot of it has to do with how do we build the trust within which we can reach an agreement.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Your involvement with the FARC negotiation, that is just one very recent example of how you have used all these principles, and you talked about some of them now, the focus on interests, and the reframing, which was such a vivid example there. I recognize some of these techniques from the classic book, Getting to Yes, that you co-authored with Richard Fisher some three and a half century ago. The book is, of course, it’s a classic, and can you tell us why do you think it is that Getting to Yes has had such a tremendous success, and been so important for negotiation and mediation all over the world since it was published?
William Ury:
Well, yes, I’ve often asked myself that same question. When Roger Fisher and I were working on the book originally, 35 years ago, together with Bruce Patton, we had no idea that this book would be as successful as it has become, but I think it’s because we were trying to bring together the principles that make for success in negotiation that are, in some sense, they’re common sense, but I would call them uncommon sense in the sense of it’s common sense that is uncommonly applied, like looking behind positions for interests, like separating the people, the emotional, the relational dimension of the negotiation from the substantive dimension so that you can simultaneously be soft in dealing with the people, gentle with dealing with the people, respectful with dealing with the people while you remain hard in making sure that you solve the problem in a good way that works for both sides. Those kinds of principles, but I think what happened is that we’ve been at the beginning of a revolution that’s taking place around the world that I’ve seen ever since, which I think of as a negotiation revolution. It’s a revolution in the way in which we as individuals or we as organizations or as societies, the way in which we make decisions, because traditionally in the world a generation or two ago, the principle form of making decisions was pretty much top-down. The people on the top of the pyramids of power gave the orders and the people on the bottom followed that. Increasingly, what we’ve seen around the world is those hierarchical forms of decision-making are giving way to horizontal forms of decision-making. That may be thanks to the knowledge revolution, thanks to the spread of democracy, thanks to a number of factors, thanks to the Internet, but the form of decision-making is shifting and the form of organizations are shifting from pyramids of power more to networks. Negotiation has become so important, so much so that in every country I go to, I always ask people, how much of your time are you spending negotiating? Almost everyone, if you think about it in the broad sense, we’re negotiating all the time with everyone that we meet, whether it’s in our personal lives, in our professional lives, or in our societies, that in order to get your job done nowadays, in order to get what you need, we in effect have to negotiate. I think that’s why getting to YES, which is a compilation of the principles of negotiation, has been so widely accepted.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
It is quite a small book, but it is so packed with wisdom and principles, and you can just read it again and again, and you always find new things. I do, at least. I want to speak to you about one of many of the techniques and principles you put forward in the book, and one that is very well known, but many of the people listening to this podcast will be getting their introduction to negotiations and the art of negotiation from you today. There is one very important acronym that you coined in GETTING TO YES, it’s called BATNA.
Can you explain to us a little bit about what the BATNA is and why it is such a crucial part of a negotiation?
William Ury:
Yes. In negotiation, you ask yourself first, what are your interests? What are your core interests? What are the other side’s interests? There’s also the question of power. Where does power come from in negotiation to meet your interests? Power comes from many sources in negotiation, but perhaps one of the greatest sources of power that we need to understand is the power of what we call a good BATNA. BATNA is an acronym standing for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It essentially means your walkaway alternative. It’s the answer to the question, how are you going to satisfy your interests if for some reason you are not able to reach agreement with the other side? Knowing what your BATNA is and developing it gives you a sense of confidence. If, for example, you are looking for a job and you’re going to have an interview and you’re going to be talking about salary and you only have one possibility, you don’t have any alternative. You can imagine how that negotiation goes. You’re likely perhaps to accept anything that they offer as long as it’s minimally reasonable. But let’s imagine that you’ve taken the intervening week before the interview to really ask yourself, what’s my BATNA? What am I going to do if I don’t get that particular job? Am I going to look for a job somewhere else, maybe perhaps even another city? Am I going to go back to school and get more education so that I can be in a better place? How am I going to satisfy my basic interests if I do not get that job? Let’s imagine you have an alternative, maybe even another job offer. Then you go into that job interview and negotiation about salary. You’re going to negotiate with more confidence because you know you have an alternative. BATNA means confidence. It means that you’re not so dependent on the other side that you have to give in to them if you have an alternative. BATNA turns out to be an extremely important concept in negotiation because every negotiation takes place in the shadow of what will happen, how each side will satisfy their interests if they’re not able to reach an agreement.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
But the BATNA, as you say, is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In my legal profession, I often find that we are fearing maybe the worst alternative to a negotiated agreement. We can go to court and we can lose in court. In Norway, you have to pay the opposing party and the winning party’s costs as well, so it can be really expensive. Why is it that you use the best alternative and not the worst alternative, the BATNA?
William Ury:
Well, yeah, it’s interesting. The BATNA is important too. It’s to understand, well, what’s the worst case scenario here? To me, I think of BATNA not as … Sometimes people resist even thinking about BATNA because they think it’s kind of negative thinking. But in fact, to me, BATNA is positive thinking. It’s like, what’s our positive alternative if we cannot reach agreement? Now, the case you mentioned of, yes, you do want to think about, okay, what’s going to happen? There’s a range of possibilities and we want to consider the worst possibility. What that does to me, thinking about BATNA, each side sometimes, when they think about what could happen, for example, in a legal case, that can often create the motivation to say, well, okay, there must be a better negotiated agreement that’s certainly better for both sides in the uncertainty of what you call BATNA, the worst alternative to a negotiated agreement. So the BATNA plays an important role too in encouraging people, incentivating people to reach agreements. Because if you think about it, what’s the purpose of negotiation? What is the purpose of negotiation? I would argue that the purpose of negotiation is not what we … Maybe the first answer that we think of, well, the purpose of negotiation is to reach agreement. I would question that. I would say the purpose of negotiation is to satisfy your interests, is to make sure that your interest gets satisfied better than you could by not negotiating. In other words, better than you could by resorting to your BATNA.
To me, that’s the purpose of negotiation is when you go into negotiation, you’re both exploring to see if there’s a good solution out there. To me, for example, if there’s a buyer and a seller who come together and very quickly and amicably discover that, you know what, the buyer can do better with another seller, the seller can do better with another buyer, and they shake hands and say, we’ll do business next time, that to me is a successful negotiation because the purpose of negotiation is to satisfy the interests of both parties. Generally speaking, in my experience, that’s going to be done through a negotiation. Negotiation, you know, and oddly enough, paradoxically enough, I think that if people think through their BATNAs, including their WATNA, their worst alternative to negotiation, they’re going to end up with better and easier negotiations than if they haven’t thought about their alternatives at all.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
That’s very interesting. Can I ask you, William, you have been in so many negotiations, how do you prepare for negotiation? Aside from maybe, of course, assessing your BATNA?
William Ury:
Well, preparation is key. I think we put ourselves at a grave disadvantage if we don’t prepare. And in today’s world, there’s so much going on that it’s often very hard to find the time to prepare. My guess is that if you only have an hour to settle a particular issue, you will end up with a better agreement if both sides take 30 minutes, half the time to each prepare, and then they talk for 30 minutes than if they talk for all 60 minutes. That’s how important preparation is. Because preparation is time to, I call it time on the balcony. It’s almost like you’re negotiating on a stage. Part of your mind goes to a mental or an emotional balcony overlooking that stage, which is a place of perspective, a place of calm, a place of clarity, where you can keep your eyes on the prize. What is it that you really want? And so for me, that’s what you do when you prepare. And how do you prepare? Oftentimes, I find it very helpful to prepare with someone else, because someone who can serve as your balcony, someone who can have some perspective. And just as you, if you’re giving an important speech, you will rehearse that speech. Why not when you are going into a negotiation, which is may be even more important to you, the outcome than the speech, why not rehearse the negotiation with someone else who could maybe play the role of your boss or your partner or your colleague, and rehearse, think about it, prepare. Preparation to me is essential for effective negotiation.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Thank you for that great tip. And of course, a great reminder as well. I also have to ask you, Willie, because you have of course, such immense experience from negotiations. What is the worst mistake one can do at the negotiation table?
William Ury:
Well, it’s a good question. The interesting thing I would say perhaps the most curious thing that I’ve learned over all these years of working in the field of negotiation, because after Roger Fisher, after we wrote this book getting to yes, the question I most heard from people was, okay, these rules might work with people who are interested in negotiation who want to cooperate. But how do you negotiate with people who do not want to cooperate? How do you negotiate with people who are difficult? And after 10 years, I wrote a book called Getting Past No, you know, negotiating with difficult people to answer that question. But what I found over the years, interestingly enough, is that the most difficult person we ever have to deal with in a negotiation is not the person sitting across the table from us. It’s the person we look at in the mirror every morning. It is ourselves, we get in our own way. So and the truth is, you know, we can’t possibly hope to be able to influence the other side, if we are not first able to influence ourselves. And what gets in our own way is our human tendency, very natural, very understandable to react, in other words, to act without thinking, to react out of anger, to react out of fear, which leads us to into behaviors that do not serve our interests. As the old saying goes, when you are angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. And I find that that happens a lot in negotiations. So that’s why my latest book is actually about on that subject of how do we get to yes with ourselves, so that we can then get to yes with others.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
And it is a fantastic book. I had the pleasure of listening to the audio version this spring. I went I went for a trip to the mountains, and you were with me in the car all the way. And because you read the book by yourself, and it’s, it’s such a nice book, with such so much wisdom, and all the all the stories that you share in the book is just fantastic. And it’s also food for thought about how one, as you say, get to yes with ourselves. But, and I know we are very limited on time here, you are probably soon off to another commitment. But can you very briefly just share with us, because you put out a six step process in the newest book, and I don’t ask you to of course, share with us all the all the content of the book, but but you have a six step process that I read out in the in the book, can you give us the cliff notes version, and a little taste of what’s in the book?
William Ury:
Yes, for sure. It’s it’s like, we want to change the outer game of negotiation, from a win lose negotiation to a win win negotiation to a call from confrontation to cooperation. It begins the work begins by changing the inner game, the game inside of ourselves. And, and, and it begins by going to the balcony begins by us being able to suspend our normal reaction. It begins by us being able to observe our emotions to observe what’s getting in the way by being able to observe it by being able to recognize that we’re able to neutralize that impact so that we don’t give that speech, we will later regret. And then, to me, you know, one of the keys in negotiation of successful negotiation, if you look at the behavior of successful negotiators is to be able to listen to the other side. And I find that I mean, that’s the key is the ability to put yourself in the other side shoes, because how can you possibly change someone’s mind if you don’t know where their mind is? And yet, what I find is, it’s very hard for us to be able to listen, particularly in difficult situations. Why is that? Because we haven’t first listened to ourselves. So the first step after we’ve gone to the balcony is to put ourselves in our own shoes, and really ask ourselves, what do we really want here? What what is it that we really want? And oftentimes, we don’t ask that question, we, we, you know, we take our position, I just want some more money, but why do you want the more money? What is it that you really want? And, and then understand that, in fact, in developing a BATNA, for example, we want to develop a BATNA, but there’s, there’s an inner BATNA, which is a commitment we can make to ourselves that no matter what, we will take care of our basic needs. If we can have that kind of confidence, then we can negotiate with a lot more freedom, because we are not so dependent on the other side. And the ability to reframe, as we talked about, it is absolutely key. But it starts with reframing our own picture. For example, going back to that story of Jaime, you know, he was able to reframe if he had seen the the gorillas as his enemy, he was able to reframe them as they’re, okay, they have their guns pointed at me, but they are potential partners, they’re potential people to collaborate with, to, to negotiate with, to cooperate with. That internal reframing allowed him to change the external game and get the negotiations started that have now led to a successful agreement. So all of those things happen inside of us, it’s about changing our inner mindset to enable an outer process of cooperation. So those are those are some of the steps there and getting to yes with yourself, there’s a lot more, but it’s it’s about this internal work that we do inside of ourselves, that then allows us to, to get to yes with others around us, in the external sense.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Okay, William, thank you so much for sharing with us all these stories and all this wisdom.
And as I said, getting to yes with yourselves, it’s such a good book, and I recommend it to everybody. On the end note here, there’s one story in in getting to yes with yourselves that is very personal for you, William, and it’s about your daughter, Gabi. You tell the story about how she was born with some difficulties, and how she has struggled and succeeded. Can you share with us the story of Gabi and how she went on to become a very successful TED speaker and everything?
William Ury:
Yes, with pleasure. My daughter, Gabi, she was born, she’s 18 now, and she’s been one of my greatest teachers in learning and teaching me how to negotiate with myself, to get to yes with others. And she was born 18 years ago with many, many congenital structural abnormalities that affected her limbs, her organs, everything. The doctors weren’t even sure she was going to be able to live. And she went through many, many difficult surgeries, over 15 major surgeries on her spine, on everything. And the one thing that Gabi has, though, is she has an indomitable will to, and one of her dreams early on was she wanted to be in the book, the Guinness Book of World Records. And so she, when she was nine or 10, she, you know, she tried the longest hopscotch course, the children’s game, and she tried most socks on one foot. But somehow, when she was 15, she discovered because she wasn’t able to run so well, and she was trying out for volleyball, that the teacher said, would you please do the plank? And the plank, as you know, is a kind of an abdominal exercise where you lie down straight on the floor, and you prop yourself up on your elbows, and you hold yourself like a plank of wood, you hold yourself for as long as you can. And it’s an exercise that people do. And most people like me, I can do it for a minute or two. Anyway, Gabi was doing it. And when people came back from running their two kilometers, Gabi was still doing it, and it had been almost 10 minutes. And the teacher said, Gabi, you’ve still been doing the plank. Gabi realized she had a, she had a, she had some kind of capacity to do this. So she started training, and you can’t get into the book of Guinness World Records until you’re 16. So she decided on her 16th birthday to go for it. And on her 16th birthday, she, the world record she had sent away from was like 40 minutes holding yourself in that position for women. And on her birthday there with the, we had some cameras set up so that we could record it in case she was able to beat the record. She went for an hour and 20 minutes. She was able to. So the next week, she was on Good Morning America, which is a big television show here in the States, and she was handed the Guinness World Record for the longest abdominal plank. And then she went on, as you mentioned, to give a TED Talk about it, which is available, and her name, Gabi Ury, U-R-Y, whatever, TED Talk. And she talks about that story. But to me, it was, and she did it. One thing that really motivated her to do it was she used it to raise money for the children’s hospital where she’d had many of her surgeries so that she could help other children who have similar conditions as hers. And through the website, she set up this whole little website, and she was able to raise over $50,000 for the children’s hospital by doing this plank. So to me, it was just a wonderful, as you can imagine, as a father, very moving experience of watching this person, this, watching my daughter, she, watch her overcome her own, her own, you know, any kind of challenges, but she, she, she overcame them. Essentially, she was able to, to really know what she really wanted, you know, put herself in her own shoes, she was able to, to go for it. And she was able to reframe, really change a situation where you think that life was against you, into kind of life being on her side. And, and, and in doing so to, to help not only herself, but, but inspire a lot of people around the world. So to me, it’s, she’s been a, she’s been perhaps my, my greatest teacher in life is my daughter, Gabi.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
William, thank you so much for sharing this story and, and for all the knowledge you’ve shared with us today and all your inspiration. And I’m sure that everyone listening is now ready to head on over to Amazon or Kindle or whatever to, to check out all your books if they haven’t already. Also, I know that you, you from time to time, you hold workshops in negotiations. I attended a workshop at Harvard this summer. Unfortunately, you were not there at that time, but I know you have another one coming up on December 8th. For many, that will probably be a bit too short time from, from this podcast goes out. But will you have any, is there any workshops coming up in Cambridge over the coming, the next year or, or in the future?
William Ury:
Yes, I do give workshops from time to time and you can, on my, my webpage, which is very simple, www.WilliamUry.com. Or you can follow me on Facebook or Twitter with the, it’s just William Ury, U-R-Y G-T-Y, which is getting to yes. So William Ury G-T-Y at Facebook or Twitter, and you can follow me and, and there’s a lot of material there too, on the website too, of videos and things just to help people get to yes, because that’s my great life passion is helping, helping people such as yourselves get to yes and help societies get to yes. To me, that’s the great challenge facing humanity right now from the micro to the macro is how do we learn to cooperate because in the spite of conflicts, in spite of differences, because I believe that there’s no problem in the world. So great, whether it’s climate change or whether it’s economics or hunger or war, that we cannot solve if only we can learn to get to yes. And that process begins with getting to yes with ourselves. So I want to wish you and all your listeners much success in getting to yes, both with yourselves and with other people around you.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Thank you so much. We will, of course, also include all the webpage URLs and Facebook information, et cetera, in the show notes. Also, on an end note here, I had the pleasure of meeting you very briefly at Loosby this spring, and you signed a lot of books for us, actually. So we’ll have a little giveaway for the audience, and I’ll give the details at the end of this podcast. So there will be signed William Ury books available for our listeners. So thank you very much for helping out with that also, William.
William Ury:
My great pleasure, Ivan. A great pleasure, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
Thank you, and thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
William Ury:
My pleasure.
Ivan of Juridisk ABC:
A bit stuttering English. I did my best, and I hope it was at least possible to understand. William’s speech was at least clear and clearly communicated. I have a competition for you today as well, the opportunity to win books. It’s a recurring theme here on the podcast, and today it is possible to win books by William Ury, signed books. I have both Getting to Yes, the classic we talked about today, and the latest book Getting to Yes with Yourselves, which was signed during the Oslo Forum at Loosby a little earlier this year.
The competition is very simple. We like to keep it simple and like competitions that make it possible for you to win books, but also support you during the podcast. If you have followed the podcast over time, you know that there is one thing I would love to get, and that is feedback via iTunes. So the competition today is once again very simple. Go to iTunes, log in to your Mac or PC. I don’t think you can do this on the phone.
So log in where you can sit down with a proper machine with a keyboard. Log in to iTunes, find the legal KBC by searching in the podcast section, and put in a message, put in a rating, put in a review of the podcast. You don’t have to give full marks to participate in the competition, but a lot of people have done it, and I really appreciate that. It contributes to the fact that the podcast is constantly being recorded by new listeners, and the more listeners we get, the easier it is to build an even better podcast, and get even more impact, and not least fantastic guests like William Burey who is with us today. So to get a signed book, or maybe two, I’ll take a break so that you can get both Getting to Yes and Getting to Yes by Yourself in a signed edition, log in to iTunes, put in a review of Juridisk ABC podcast, and as soon as you’ve done that, send an email to post krøllalfa juridiskabc.no with your name and which review you put in so that I can identify it, so we don’t have any problems with someone stealing the review from someone else.
But put in your user name and what you have written so that we can find it later. And then you are in the draw, and I have to be honest and say that there are usually quite good chances to win these competitions. There are not hundreds of participants who write in, so if you are out quickly when you listen to the podcast and scroll through iTunes, you can get copies of William Burey’s books very quickly. So I hope many of you do that, and I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We will stick to the trail of negotiation.
This is the first big negotiation podcast with the founder of modern negotiation technology, William Burey, together with Roger Fisher who wrote Getting to Yes, a book that is inspired by the Harvard process and is published in Norway. And not least, the author of the book will be the subject of the next episode, so we have another podcast ready with Norwegian guests and Norwegian language. So if you want to delve even deeper into this topic, and I hope you do, it’s a very exciting topic, then you jump on to the next podcast here on Juridisk ABC. Efter at du selvfølgelig har vært innom iTunes og lagt igjen en nytten anmeldelse. Det var alt for i dag.
Jeg takker så mye for at du var med helt til slutten i dag. Håper å høre fra deg, og håper at du hadde glede av dagens podcast. Så er vi straks tilbake med neste episode av Juridisk ABC. Ha det bra. Du har hørt Juridisk ABC podcast.
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