Bill's written and published several books.

He's here with one of those books, which is "Getting to Yes

with Yourself."

As I read your press on your site,

it's almost looking at it as a prequel to "Getting to Yes,"

which was your first book, which has been printed

12 million times in English and has

been published in 37 languages.

So we've got quite an accomplished,

well read individual with us today.

Other books are "The Third Side,"

"Getting Past No," and "The Power of a Positive No."

But that's just a small bit of who Bill is.

And I don't know if-- for those of you who

I sent the link around to his page,

I'll try not to bore you or try not to go on for too long.

But he's the co-founder of Harvard's program

on negotiation.

And he's currently a distinguished senior fellow

at Harvard, correct?

But this is where it starts to get really, really interesting.

He's worked providing mediation services in conflicts ranging

from Kentucky coal mines to the Middle East and to the Balkans.

He's worked with Jimmy Carter to create an organization

to help avert or solve for civil wars

where he's actually traveled to Indonesia

and helped to resolve a civil war,

and in Venezuela to prevent a civil war.

So later today when you think you're really cool

and you've closed that $20,000 upgrade for your client,

think back to this and you'll put it in perspective, OK?

It's still really cool.

Go close it.

But put it in perspective.

He's also won several awards or been recognized

many, many times for his work.

There were one or two that jumped off the page for me.

He's won a Distinguished Service medal from Russia for his work.

So in addition to everything else that I've

been telling you, he actually might be a spy for all we know.

He has a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

The work that he's done in terms of global political conflict

is just part of what he does.

He also works with top corporate executives

in training them to learn how to be better mediators and better

negotiators.

And what I'm really looking forward today

is hearing how you kind of marry global conflict resolution

to good business practices.

And after Bill speaks with us for a few minutes

and presents to us, I hope we can

have a wide open conversation around that.

We have between 15 and 20 of his most recent books

here today, so after the talk if you'd like one,

please grab one.

If you'd really like one and there isn't one left for you,

just get in touch with me afterwards

and we'll get a few more for those people who

really want them, OK?

So thanks for coming today.

Welcome, Bill.

Bill, it's all yours.

WILLIAM URY: OK.

Thanks, Brian.

[APPLAUSE]

Appreciate it.

That was quite an intro.

What I want to talk with you this morning

is really about what I think is one

of the more important, valuable, useful skills that any of us

can have in today's challenging times,

and that's a skill of negotiation, of getting to yes,

of trying to reach agreement with others.

And as I've been in this field ever since I

was a graduate student up the way

here at Harvard many years ago, I've

had kind of like a front seat view on something

that I call a revolution that actually accompanies

the knowledge revolution, the information

revolution of which Google is a part, which

is a more silent revolution, but it's

a revolution in the way in which we as individuals,

organizations, or societies make decisions.

Because typically a generation or two ago,

the main way in which people made

decisions was people on the top of the pyramids of power

gave the orders, and the people on the bottom

simply followed the orders.

And now thanks to the information revolution,

those pyramids of power are starting

to collapse into organizational forms

that more resemble networks, flatter

forms, more horizontal forms.

And as that shifts, the form of decision making shifts

from vertical to horizontal, and another name

for horizontal decision making is negotiation, is getting yes.

So that to get our jobs done nowadays,

we're literally dependent on dozens, hundreds, thousands

of individuals, organizations over whom

we exercise no direct control.

If we want to get to yes with them, we have to negotiate.

So let me just actually ask you, if you don't mind,

a few quick questions about your own negotiating experience.

Because if you think about it, what I'm interested in

is what stops us from getting the yes?

So let me just ask you to think about your own experience

for a moment here and ask yourself the question of, if I

were to define negotiation very simply and very broadly

as trying to reach agreement with someone-- you have

some interests which maybe you hold in common

like an ongoing relationship with a customer,

and some interests which maybe are in tension with each other,

like you'd like to get more money for your contract

for Google, and maybe they'd like to pay you less,

who do you find yourself negotiating

with in the broad sense of the term in the course of your day?

Just if you wouldn't mind just calling it out.

Who do you negotiate with?

AUDIENCE: Spouse.

WILLIAM URY: Your spouse.

OK, we'll start with the hard ones there.

AUDIENCE: Your children.

WILLIAM URY: Your children, OK.

Who else?

Your what?

AUDIENCE: Colleagues.

WILLIAM URY: Your colleagues.

OK.

Who else?

AUDIENCE: Internal teams.

WILLIAM URY: Your what?

AUDIENCE: Internal teams.

WILLIAM URY: Internal teams.

Right.

AUDIENCE: CMOs.

WILLIAM URY: What was that?

AUDIENCE: CMOs.

WILLIAM URY: CMOs, OK.

CMOs.

Who else?

AUDIENCE: My teenagers.

WILLIAM URY: Your teenagers.

OK.

So it's at home, it's at work.

Now if you were to kind of just make a ballpark estimate

of how much of your time do you spend broadly

speaking in the course of your day,

engaged in the process of back and forth communication, trying

to reach agreement with your teenagers, your spouse,

your colleagues, your clients, your suppliers, your boss,

the internal partners, and so on?

What percentage of your time do you

think it would be, what fraction of the time if you

had to give it a certain percentage?

What would you say?

AUDIENCE: About half.

AUDIENCE: Half.

WILLIAM URY: Half.

Yeah.

How many would agree with that?

It's at least half?

OK.

So we don't always think of it formally as negotiation,

but in the informal sense, we're engaged in this process

from the time we get up in the morning with our spouse,

teenagers, kids, and so on to the time we go to bed at night.

And so let me just ask you a couple other questions.

I mean, would you say, maybe looking

at the past, say, five or 10 years of your work career,

would you say that the amount of time

that you spend negotiating, has it stayed pretty steady?

Does it go down over time as you get

maybe more authority in your job?

Or does it go up?