Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with William Ury (@WilliamUryGTY), cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and one of the world’s best-known and most influential experts on negotiation. He is coauthor of Getting to Yes, the all-time bestselling negotiation book in the world; the author of one of my favorite books on negotiation (Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations); and author of the new book: Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict.
He has served as a mediator in boardroom battles, labor conflicts, and civil wars around the world. An avid hiker, he lives in Colorado.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: William, I’m so thrilled to be spending time with you today and having this conversation, so thank you for carving out the time.
William Ury: Oh, it’s a great pleasure, Tim. I’ve been looking forward to this.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve read more than one of your books and in fact used Getting Past No specifically to help build my first company, and have really used many of your frameworks and techniques. So this is a real treat for me. And I thought we might hit rewind, though, going back in time before Getting Past No to Getting to Yes, but more specifically looking at Roger Fisher, and learning about Roger Fisher. How did the two of you first connect?
William Ury: We connected at Harvard. I was 22. I was new, a graduate student in social anthropology. I wanted to study anthropology because I wanted to understand human beings. I was curious. It was a license to be curious and to travel, learn about other cultures and figure out why we’re so strange in some ways. But I wanted to apply anthropology to something practical and I thought, what about the subject of war and peace? Something you could really sink your teeth into.
Why is it that we’re poised on the verge of self-destruction as a species? And so I had to write a research paper in anthropology about what I might do field work on, and I thought, why don’t I do field work on a peace negotiation? So I heard Roger Fisher was over at the law school and he was working on peace negotiation, so I went in to see him and he was very generous with his time. And then he said, “Send me your paper.” And I sent him the paper. I didn’t think of it twice. And then January 1977, cold January night, I was on the third floor of my attic room grading my students’ exams and studying for my own exams, and the phone rings and there’s a voice that says, “This is Professor Roger Fisher. I just read your paper about taking an anthropological view of the Middle East peace negotiations and I found it so interesting I sent the central chart to the assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, because he’s working on these things. I thought he might find it interesting.”
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
William Ury: I was floored. I was just like speechless. I didn’t know what to say. And he said, “And I’d like you to come work with me.” And so that phone call I can honestly say changed my life. That phone call. That generous phone call, that generous invitation from Roger to come work with him on international peace negotiations and other negotiations. Really that’s been the course I’ve — never did you get a call from a professor, let alone on a weekend night. And never in my wildest imagination would I have imagined that some idea that I’d cooked up in my little attic rental room on the third floor would be a possible use to a practitioner in the world’s most complicated negotiations. So I got hooked and I’ve been on that journey ever since.
Tim Ferriss: I can see that being quite the dopamine reward rush.
William Ury: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Not only receiving the call but having your work sent to the highest levels on the front lines is really something out of the storybooks. At the time, was Roger teaching the Devising Seminar, or was that a precursor to what he was doing at the time? Or maybe it came afterwards?
William Ury: The Devising Seminar was a — he was just doing that, and that’s what he asked me to work on, to coordinate and facilitate this Devising Seminar, which was an amazing thing, which was every couple of weeks at the Harvard Faculty Club over dinner, a bunch of faculty from different disciplines and visiting diplomats would be invited to what Roger called the Devising Seminar. Devise means to create, to be inventive, to craft something new. And he would pose a question that you would never ask in academia, which is, what can the secretary of state or what can this president do tomorrow morning? What can they operationally do tomorrow morning that could help take us forward on the Middle East or South Africa or the Cold War or Northern Ireland or whatever the issue was?
And instead of just sitting back and predicting or analyzing, this collective intelligence was being harnessed to try to focus in on, what practical step could someone do tomorrow morning?
Tim Ferriss: What in Roger’s background drove him to be so motivated to take action in these type of conflicts or circumstances?
William Ury: He’d just graduated from Harvard. He’d gone into World War II. And when he came back — and he fought in the war, in the Pacific War, and when he came back, a lot of his friends were gone, didn’t come back. And his father had been a lawyer. He went into international law. He went to work at Paris on the Marshall Plan. But his passion really was seeing if we could find a better way to deal with our differences than dropping bombs and destroying everything.
And I had the same passion. Actually I’d spent some time growing up in Europe in my childhood, and I’d seen the ruins still in France and Germany and other places. And you saw all the graveyards of World War I, World War II. And then there was every expectation that there might be a World War III. There was a nuclear bomb shelter in the school. And it was like, “We’ve got to have a more creative way.” And that’s, I think, what led to the Devising Seminar and to Roger’s work. And that’s how he and I really came together with a common passion.
Tim Ferriss: Are there any particular, maybe intervention is too strong a word, but conclusions or next actions that came out of those Devising Seminars that stand out to you?
William Ury: Yeah, there were several, many. One was about a year into my work, less than a year, probably. Yeah, actually about a year into my work. It was end of August, 1978. Roger called me into his office and said, “Guess what? I just came back from Martha’s Vineyard and I happened to play a game of tennis with Cy Vance,” who was the US Secretary of State. “And he told me about, there’s this peace summit planned in September where President Carter is bringing the leader of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, the president, and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, together for a peace summit.
And he asked me if I had any ideas. And I brought him back to the cottage and I showed him this little booklet that Roger Fisher and I had worked on hard, which was called International Mediators: A Working Guide, which we joked there was about maybe six in the world. So I had a very small audience. But there was an idea in it, which was a creative idea that came out of the Law of the Sea negotiations for a one-text process.
And he said he suggested it to Vance. And Vance had asked him to write up a memo. And so we called a Devising Seminar. We got Louis Sohn, who’d worked on the Law of the Sea, and we got all these professors. And then we wrote a memo and sent it to Cy Vance.
And then Camp David happened. The Egyptians and Israelis arrived at Camp David for this retreat. And after three days they were just going out it hammer and tongs. They were just dug into their positions. Egypt demanded the entire Sinai back. Israel wanted to keep 1/3. Menachem Begin said, “I’ll pluck out my right eye and cut off my right hand rather than surrender a single settlement.”
They were just about to give up. And then Cy Vance remembered the memo in his briefcase. And he said to Carter, he said, “Well, why don’t we try out this idea for a one-text process?” And they tried it out. And this is the way it went, was the Americans, instead of asking the Egyptians and Israelis in the traditional way, the mediator goes in and asks you to make a concession. No one wants to make a concession.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
William Ury: No one wants to make the first concession because that’ll signal weakness for sure. And Begin and Sadat said, “Well, I have to go back and consult.” And it wasn’t going to go anywhere. So the Americans said instead, with a one-text process they said, “Don’t make any concessions. We understand what your positions are. Just tell us what your interests are.” And they said, “What do you mean?” “Well, tell us what you really want. What are you really concerned about? You’re trying to draw a line in the sand, but what’s the underlying driver? What is it you’re really afraid of? What are you concerned of? What do you really want?”
And the Egyptians talked about sovereignty. Sadat said, “This land has been ours since the time of the Pharaohs and we want it back.” And the Israelis talked about security. Said Egyptians had attacked them four times in the previous 30 years across the Sinai, and they didn’t want that happening again. So then the question became not, where do we draw a line in the sand? But, how do we get Egyptian sovereignty and Israeli security? And the Americans went back and drafted up what’s called a — we call it a one-text. It’s a non-paper paper. It’s very low status. You’ve got coffee stains on it, or whatever it is, but it was an idea to do both. To try and reconcile both interests. To meet the interests of both.
And it was based on an idea, actually, the Egyptians had surfaced, which was a demilitarized Sinai. A Sinai where Egypt gets the entire Sinai back, the flag can fly everywhere, but it’s demilitarized so Israel gets security. So the Americans can —
Tim Ferriss: And in this context — sorry to interrupt. Demilitarized means there cannot be presence of military forces?
William Ury: That’s it. Egyptian tanks can go nowhere. And basically the idea was to propose that the Americans would put technical means. You’d put a little multinational force in there. You could tell if a goat crossed, but no armed forces there. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Wow. What a story.
William Ury: And the idea is, the one-text, the way it works is very simple. It’s kind of like what, in Silicon Valley, they call rapid prototyping nowadays. But essentially the Americans took the idea and they said, “We’re not asking you to accept it. We don’t want you to make any decisions. All we want you to do is criticize it.”
Well, no one likes to make a hard decision, but everybody loves to criticize. So the Egyptians criticized it, the Israelis criticized it. The Americans went back and redrafted the proposal to try to address the concerns. And then they brought it back and did it again. And again, more criticism. The Americans went through that process 23 times. There were 23 drafts over the course of 13 days, even less because there was fewer days. And by the end of it, only at the very end of that process did Carter go to Sadat and Begin, the two leaders, and say, “This is the best we can do. We can’t improve it anymore. We can’t make it better for one without making it worse for the other. This is the best we can do. Do you want it or not?”
And then Sadat and Begin were faced with a very different decision. Instead of having to make multiple painful concessions, they had to make only one decision, and only at the end of the process when they could see exactly what they were going to get in return. And so Sadat could see he was going to get the entire Sinai back. Begin could see he was going to get an unprecedented peace with Egypt, and they both said yes. And that’s what led to the Camp David Peace Treaty, a treaty that has lasted 40 years. Has lasted actually more than that at this point, 45 years. To this point, has lasted to this day even in the midst of wars, assassination, coup d’etat. And it was the inventive idea of applying our creativity not just to the hardware, software of computers, but to the way in which we negotiate. That there are better ways to negotiate, more effective. And that was a really powerful example for me.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the software of humans in a way, right?
William Ury: The software of humans. That’s what we need. That’s really what we need, Tim, right now.
Tim Ferriss: And to debug. So you mentioned a few things I want to underscore. The first was the power of looking behind positions for the underlying interests. I suspect we’ll come back to this, for sure, but identifying the wants, desires, concerns, fears that are behind a request or a unrelenting position. And you also mentioned something that I’d love for you — and you didn’t say it in these words but it seemed to imply what I’m about to mention, and that is writing the other side’s “victory speech.”
What are they going to use to explain to others why they agreed to X? Whatever that is. Would you mind expanding on that? It doesn’t need to be in the Camp David context. Could be in another context. But it strikes me that, in both cases, these leaders need to go back and explain to their cabinets, to their populace, why they did X. And that that type of consideration of external judgment I would imagine accounts for a lot of failures at the negotiating table. So if you could speak to any or all of that, I would love to hear.
William Ury: Yeah, the victory speech is one of my favorite exercises because you’re looking at an impossible situation. It could be with your boss, it could be with your roommate, or it could be an international conflict, but you’re looking at something seemingly impossible. It’s kind of like, I like to climb mountains. You’re at the bottom of the mountain. You look at the top of the mountain and it seems impossible to get there. You can’t get from here to there in your mind, but you might be able, if you use your imagination, put yourself on top of the mountain, get from there to here, and then you can figure out your way back.
In other words, you can work backwards. And that’s what is behind the victory speech, which is, when you’re facing a difficult conflict, start by writing out the other side’s victory speech. Imagine you’re asking your boss for something. It might be a situation. And you write out, “What is it you imagine?” Just as a thought experiment, imagine your boss says yes to you. They accept what you want them to do. They say, “Yeah.” Now, imagine your boss then has to go and justify that to someone else whom he cares about. Maybe his board of directors, maybe his peers or her peers, and write out the victory speech.
Just write out maybe three talking points. How could they present to the people that they care about why they said yes to your proposal? It’s got to be a victory for them. It going to be a victory for you, obviously, because they’re doing what you want them to do. But think about it and think about the hardest questions that they’re going to get, the criticisms that they’re going to receive. And then think about, what are the best answers they can give? Go through that exercise and then see your job as a negotiator as helping them deliver that victory speech. And I can tell you about how I’ve used it, but that’s the essence of it, is to work backwards, think about what victory would look like, and then work forwards.
Tim Ferriss: I would love to hear how you’ve used it in any context.
William Ury: Well, one context, back in 2017 Donald Trump had become President. Kim Jong-un of North Korea was testing nuclear missiles, ballistic nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. Testing nuclear weapons. Obama had warned Trump that this was the most dangerous situation he was leaving on his watch, and Trump was saying, “This won’t happen.” And experts were worrying this could be a nuclear war, a nuclear crisis. Some people were saying it was a 50 percent odds of war.
And so I sat down with my colleagues and I thought, okay, let’s sit down. I don’t know that much about North Korea. A little bit. But let’s see if we can write out Donald Trump’s victory speech and, more importantly, Kim Jong-un’s victory speech in which they decide not to go to war but to actually meet instead and try and work out an agreement. And for Trump, he was more of an open book, as you knew a lot about him.
He would have to say, his three talking points might be, “This was the best deal ever. Obama couldn’t do this, Clinton couldn’t do this, Bush couldn’t do this, but I could do this. I made the biggest deal that really spared the world from nuclear war. It’s the biggest deal ever and I kept…” that was point number one. Point number two would be, “I kept America safe.” And point number three is, “And I didn’t spend a penny,” because that was important for him.
But Kim Jong-un was like a black — we didn’t know. There was nothing known about him. A black book. It was like there was nothing really known about him. He was new and so on. And the only person I could find out who knew anything about Kim Jong-un, I went on the web, was a retired American basketball player by the name of Dennis Rodman. So in order to write Kim Jong-un’s victory speech, I tried to figure it out on the web, what he would care about, safety and respect and economics. But to really understand him, I had to try and track down Dennis Rodman. And that is the key, is to really go to the ends of the world, whoever you need to talk to, figure out what drives the person you’re trying to influence.
Tim Ferriss: And so what happened? Did you get ahold of Dennis? Did you guys have a powwow? What happened?
William Ury: Well, we did. It took a while. You tried the proverbial six degrees of separation. This person, that person. I know someone who knew the coach of the Lakers, who’d been the coach or whatever. But that didn’t work out. And then I tried a different way and I finally got a hold of someone who was a friend of Dennis Rodman’s. And I talked to him and explained, “Look, the world’s in danger here and I need to talk to Dennis. He’s the only one who seems to know Kim Jong-un. He’s the only American.”
And he said, “Well, Dennis comes to visit me sometimes. I’ll arrange for us to have pizza sometime. I’ll let you know. He’s in L.A. He comes to stay with me.” So at the appointed moment I flew out there for pizza. Dennis wasn’t there. The guy said, “Oh, he goes out partying. Sometimes he forgets or whatever.” He said, “But you can spend the night.” And so I canceled my plans, spent the night.
Next morning, finally Dennis Rodman’s there. And he says, “What do you want? Bad day, man. Bad day. Why do you want to talk to me?” And I said, “Well, because you’re the only one who knows Kim Jong-un and I’d really like to hear what you learned from him about what makes him tick. What are his interests?” And he then proceeded to tell me the story of how he’d gotten to know him. He’d gone over for an exhibition basketball game one day, and he was just watching the game, and suddenly Kim Jong-un is sitting right next to him. And then Kim invites him out to go drinking, and then he goes home and he holds Kim’s baby. And he told me a couple things.
He said, “I actually believe that Kim doesn’t want war. I know he’s perceived in the West as kind of a madman and so on, but he doesn’t want war. He actually wants to engage with the West.” And then as an example he gave me this. He said, “One day I was talking to Kim and he told me what his dream was.” I said, “What was his dream?” He said, “His dream, he told me, was one day to walk down Fifth Avenue with Dennis Rodman, go to Madison Square Garden, and watch the New York Knicks play the Chicago Bulls.” Bingo. It was like — I listened for those little — this is what you do in negotiation. You listen for those little nuggets that give you an insight into the dreams. It’s beyond the interests, it’s deeper than the interests. The dreams and the fears. Those two things are really big. The dreams of the other side.
And I got a sense, okay, maybe there is something possible here. My colleagues and I then worked on it. But the world was shocked a year later when Donald Trump sat down with Kim Jong-un in Singapore and they actually got along with each other. But I wasn’t shocked because I had talked to Dennis Rodman. So Dennis Rodman helped me figure out what Kim Jong-un’s victory speech was. And what was interesting was, after Singapore, those two guys didn’t wait.
Donald Trump tweeted, “The American people are safe now. No worries.” He tweeted his victory speech already. And Kim Jong-un also hailed this is a great victory for North Korea, just their meeting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
William Ury: And what was key was that, even though they didn’t reach an agreement, they changed the atmosphere through meeting, and the perceived risk of nuclear war went down from maybe 50 percent to one percent. So it shows just the power of the victory speech, of each one being able to be a hero to the people that they care about.
Tim Ferriss: So William, I would love to ask you a question, which I hesitate to ask because it’s a hot button issue, but because you have so much time in conflict zones, or at least operating as an advisor to those who are contending with conflict zones, what do you wish you could do or orchestrate, or what type of conversation do you wish you could ordinate with respect to the situation in the Middle East as it stands right now? Was there anything that would be on your wishlist or top of your priorities in terms of strategy and how to diffuse some of what’s happening in the Middle East?
William Ury: Wow, so this is what I would say. It is a hot button issue. I would say there is no solution in the Middle East. Let’s be realistic. There’s no two-state solution. There’s no solution because there’s no end to it. But there might just be a beginning, a new beginning, because I’m a possibilist. People ask me, after all these years, are you an optimist? Are you a pessimist? And actually, even though I am an optimist of sorts, I’d like to say I’m a possibilist. I believe in possibility. And even when it comes to a situation seemingly as impossible, as heartbreaking, as heartrending as the Middle East is right now, I actually think that even in these times of extreme crisis, you can see possibilities. If you can just stay still for a moment, if you can, what I call, go to the balcony, just kind of detach yourself a little bit, watch it as a play, see where the possibilities are.
And even though there might not be a solution, there could be a process. Even though there’s no end to the conflict, there could be a beginning of a different way of living together. Because if you look behind the positions, the things that people fight about, the things that people say they want, for what their deep underlying interests are, what are their deepest concerns? What are their deepest fears? What are their deepest aspirations? If you dive down, go down the iceberg to what’s underneath the water, then I think the question then becomes reframed as how can the Israelis and Palestinians, two peoples, live together? How can they live together?
It’s the ancient Stoic question, right? How do we live together? How can they live together in dignity, security, and how can they live alongside each other? And if that’s the question, then you ask yourself, has that ever been done in the world before with other impossible conflicts? And I can say in the last 45 years, whether it’s in South Africa where blacks and whites, there was a race war, or Northern Ireland, sectarian war between Catholics and Protestants, or Colombia, guerrilla war and other places too, where it seemed absolutely impossible. I’ve watched people do that. I’ve watched people. There was no solution. There’s no ending of the conflict, but there’s a transformation of the conflict. The conflict is transformed and remarkable results occur, and I think that that’s still possible in the Middle East.
Tim Ferriss: What were any of the key elements in any of the conflicts that you mentioned that provided the opening for that transformation, that turning point? Are there any common ingredients or any historical examples that you can think of?
William Ury: Well, one is the right leaders, the right kinds of leaders who can, I’ll give you just an example from South Africa, who’s someone I admire who is an iconic possibilist. Nelson Mandela, who was a kind of very reactive kind of guy, was a boxer, quick to take slights and so on. But when he went into prison, he was in prison for 27 years. He really focused on self-mastery. He learned to meditate. He learned to observe himself. He writes about it in his autobiography. He learned to control his natural reactivity. He learned what I call to go to the balcony, not to react, but to go to the balcony. And then he also studied the language of his enemies. He studied, I mean, that’s the first thing he did in jail, was he studied Afrikaans, the language of his enemies. Because he thought the language is the way into someone’s — that’s the way you connect with people. And he studied their history. He studied their traumas, the Boer War and how they’d suffered, concentration, I mean, the whole thing. He got into their suffering.
And then he also mobilized people. When he got out, he started meeting with the other side and building then what I call a golden bridge, a way out. He was trying to help his political enemies find a way out of the situation. He helped write their victory speech, in other words, and he helped mobilize the community, which is what I call the third side. So he did these three things, which are go to the balcony, which is detach from the situation, don’t react. Help build the other side a golden bridge, make it easier for them to make the decisions you want them to make. And then mobilize this resource around of the community, which was the community in South Africa, blacks and whites and all others. And then the worldwide community to create a container within which even a seemingly impossible conflict could be transformed.
So to me, it’s the leaders who can and the community can work together. It struck me so much that Mandela, he once said, it’s impossible. People say it’s impossible until it’s done. I was in South Africa when he was in jail, and it seemed, people thought this was going to be 30 years, 40 years. I came back five years later, he was the president. It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of political violence, but the conflict was transformed. And if they could do it, then I believe it can be done in the Middle East, it could be done. And it’s not just a magical leader. It was the whole community engaging in a way that works. I’ve seen the same thing in Northern Ireland. I’ve seen the same thing in Colombia. It’s our birthright, really. I believe we can all do this. It’s hard work, there’s no question, but it’s possible.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s take a closer look at going to the balcony, watching something as a play, taking this detached observer role, perhaps, if that’s not too much of a strain of a descriptor. This leads me to wonder what you have found or discovered or observed to be effective for deescalating emotions when things get heated in the midst of a negotiation. Now that could be you need to go to the balcony, but you need some space. So what do you say, what do you do to create that space? And equally important, if the other side maybe does not have your books and does not have either the capacity or the eagerness to go to the balcony, how do you help them go to the balcony or at least deescalate things so they don’t spin out?
William Ury: First of all, I think these are all innate human potentials. This is not, you don’t have to read my book. You could read my book, but these are innate human potentials, and it goes back, this is our birthright. The Stoics talk, it’s about self-mastery. It’s the idea that negotiation, even though we think of it as trying to get the other side to do what we want them to do, it starts with influencing ourselves. You can’t possibly influence someone else unless you can influence yourself first. And human beings, we’re reaction machines. The saying goes: “When angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a good one.
William Ury: That happens more often than not.
Tim Ferriss: Or send the email, the best email you will regret.
William Ury: That’s it. You send the best email you’ll ever regret. Exactly. That’s it. The best text, the best WhatsApp, whatever it is that you will ever regret. And we do that all the time, and we live in a very reactive age where you just instantly, the temptation to just to hit the send button, to just like, whoa, okay. No, there’s a save as draft on email for a reason. That’s the balcony button. And what’s the alternative? I mean, it’s very natural for us to react. We act, especially in conflict where there’s a lot of anger, there’s fear, whatever it is, you’re quick to react.
But the ability to pause for a moment, it’s that faint gap between the stimulus and the response, the ability to, I like to use the metaphor of imagining that you’re negotiating, the negotiation is taking place on a play. All the characters are there. Part of you goes, your mind goes to a mental and emotional balcony overlooking the stage where you can suddenly keep your eyes on the prize. What is most important to you, and then see the big picture. What can you do? What can you do? See the larger picture. Where’s the way through this labyrinth in front of you? That art of going to the balcony I’ve found is key, and I’ve learned it, and had to learn it over and over. I fall off the balcony. You get back on the balcony.
Tim Ferriss: Are there rules or conditions you can set to mitigate some of the risk of emotional spiraling? And what prompts this question is a story, I believe it was in labor management group where in the conversation you adopted the role that only one person could get angry at a time. So it seemed like each party knew they would have their turn to get really pissed off, so —
William Ury: That’s it.
Tim Ferriss: You wouldn’t deal with the sort of arms race of yelling and screaming and whatever tantrums might go along with it or aggression. Are there other techniques that you have used successfully in these types of potentially heated conversations or negotiations?
William Ury: Well, the one you mentioned is a good one because it’s kind of a joint rule, right? Another is just to take frequent breaks. Sometimes negotiations, I remember labor management negotiations, they’d go on for hours and hours and hours, and it was kind of almost like a, no one wanted to call a break. It was almost like an exercise in bladder control or something. And I find frequent breaks, breaks are time to be on the balcony. It’s that time for that in the corridor conversation that you can have with someone or with your own side. Frequent breaks.
And that’s just even when you’re dealing online, just taking breaks, really helpful. I like to go for walks. Before any difficult negotiation in the middle of it, just go for a walk, clear your head. Some people work out, some people, it’s just anything you can do to change your state so you can kind of bring your best to the negotiation rather than as often, we bring our worst.
Even a simple one. What I like to do is I learned this in a very high stakes negotiation once when the president of Venezuela was shouting at me for 30 minutes, Hugo Chávez, I wdon’t know if you remember him. Hugo Chávez was, it was midnight in front of his whole cabinet, and I’d been sent there to try and mediate between him and his political opposition. And he said, “Ury, so how are things going?” And I said, “It seems to me, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your ministers. I’ve been talking to the opposition, making some progress.” Well, progress wasn’t the word he wanted to hear. “What do you mean, progress? Are you a fool? You’re not seeing the dirty tricks those, the other side is up to.” And he leaned into my face. I could almost feel his hot breath, almost a spittle. And he proceeded to shout at me and I was like, oh, God, a year of work down the drain. I’m humiliated and embarrassed in front of his whole cabinet. You go through all these things.
And then I remembered a simple technique, which a friend of mine had once told me, which is, “William, when you’re in a tough situation, pinch the palm of your hand.” And I said, “No, why would I pinch the palm of my hand?” He said, “Because it will give you some momentary pain. It’ll keep you alert.” So whatever reason, I remembered at that moment. Pinched the palm of my hand, and sure enough, then I was able to kind of stop for a second and ask, I was just about to think about what I was going to say and reply to him. And I thought, is it really going to, what’s my interest here? My interest is in calming the situation. Is it really going to help the situation if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela?
Tim Ferriss: In front of his guys.
William Ury: Right. So I bit my tongue and I proceeded to listen to him, listen to him, just observe him. Why is he doing this? Is he trying to impress his cabinet and so on? And when you don’t react, there was no fuel for him for his anger. So after 15 minutes, 20 minutes, this guy could go on for seven hours. He was known for giving seven-hour speeches. At around 30 minutes I saw, I was watching his body language, and I saw his shoulders sink, and he said to me, in a weary tone of voice, he said, “So, Ury, what should I do?” Well, that, my friends, is the faint sound of a human mind opening.
And at that moment I thought, “Mr. President, it’s December. Last Christmas, the festivities were canceled. Why not just take a break, give everyone a truce for three weeks. Let everyone enjoy the holidays with their families and come back in January. Maybe everybody will be in a better mood to listen.” He looked at me for a moment, he was kind of startled, and then he clapped me on the back and he said, “That’s a great idea. I’m going to announce that in my next speech.” His mood had completely shifted. And what I learned from that, Tim, was that maybe the greatest power you have in a negotiation is the power not to react. It’s the power to go to the balcony instead.
Tim Ferriss: This seems like a nice bridge to discuss, and we’re going to get into all sorts of specifics, BATNAs and whatnot, but this is a specific, which is how the different species of silence, how can you use silence in different ways? Because I remember, for instance, I listened to this audiobook, this was a hundred years ago when I was just thinking about starting my own company, and I listened to this book, it’s an audiobook. It was mostly real estate focused. It was called Secrets of Power Negotiating. I think it was Roger Dawson. I might be getting the name wrong. In any case, he talked about the flinch. But the flinch followed by silence. And this is very mundane, maybe, but certainly having spent a lot of time in foreign countries, just looking as I look, my price is automatically 20X retail. That’s the starting point. Sort of the flinch, and then wait.
But if you fill the void with words, it doesn’t have the desired effect. Where they tell you the price, you’re like, “Oh, God, it’s so expensive.” Then you just shut up and let the silence do the heavy lifting. You just gave a much more sophisticated example in a higher stakes environment. What are some of the ways that people can use silence? This applies to interviewing also, by the way. I had Cal Fussman who used to write the What I Learned column for Esquire magazine, who interviewed Gorbachev and Muhammad Ali and all of these icons. He said, “Let the silence do the work.” That was one of his tips to me. What are some of the different ways that you can use silence or stories related to using silence?
William Ury: Yeah, I’m a big believer in the power of silence. In our culture, we tend to fill up space because we feel like if there’s a moment of pause, I mean, in East Asia, as you know, silence is appreciated. And in an elevator, if everyone’s quiet, everyone gets a little nervous. But in fact, if you can just relax into the silence and pause, in negotiation, when you ask for something, it gives the other side a chance to think about it. And maybe if you say “no” or whatever it is, you’re just, silence is, you weaken your “no” if you follow it up. Now, just let it hang in the air. Let them work through it, because human minds take a little time to digest it and let the discomfort, if there’s any, work in your favor. There’s no reason why you have to say something.
And the other thing is, I have a colleague, Jared Curhan at MIT, who’s done studies of silence, just taking negotiations, they record negotiations. And then they measure the amount of silence in the negotiation, the number of pauses. And interestingly enough, they found a correlation between the amount of silence and the outcomes that are mutually collaborative and cooperative, that actually silence actually helps you arrive at agreements that are good for both sides, just because it gives people a chance to pause. So silence in the sense you were talking about, can give a chance for the other side to actually digest it, and maybe it strengthens the persuasiveness of your argument. So I absolutely agree. Silence is one of your very best tools in a negotiation. The art of pausing.
Tim Ferriss: The art of pausing. Let’s talk about the use of objective measures or data for maybe preventing escalation or just facilitating negotiation. For instance, if you are asking for a raise, you might talk about inflation rights and X, Y, and Z, which ideally you’re not really debatable points. They’re reasonably agreed upon facts. How can you use facts in negotiations effectively? And do you have any examples that people might be able to try to wrap their heads around?
William Ury: Yeah, I think one of the big things in negotiation is, like negotiation about a race, for example, is you want one thing that they want something else. It often becomes a contest of wills. Who’s stronger, who’s going to hold out longer, whatever. And if it’s a contest of wills, oftentimes it gets emotional. It gets, “I’m not going to give in. My manhood is on the line,” or whatever it is. You get into this kind of contest of wills and it doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s high stakes. And there is an alternative to that, which is not to make it a contest of will, but to say, “Look, you think that it should be at this, you should get paid this much. I think you should get paid that much. But let’s look objectively at the market rate. What is the market for your kinds of skills in this kind of job? Let’s look at the average thing.”
And suddenly it’s a lot easier for people to defer to what seems to be a persuasive objective standard than it is to give in. No one wants to give in, no one wants to give in, and people will fight not to give in. So preparing those objective criteria, persuasive, and then like, okay, let’s take a look. There’s this criteria, there’s that criterion, and then suddenly you’re in a collaborative exercise to figure out what’s a fair resolution rather than in a contest of wills where one side’s going to win, one side’s going to lose, and the loser’s going to make the winner pay for it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is a big deal in so many, probably all cultures on some level, but the whole concept of losing face. Say, in China, diu lien, to lose face, this is a very big deal. And people not just fight not to lose face, but in some cultures, I mean, they’ll take it themselves to the grave to not lose face, right? It’s a huge variable in terms of consideration. I’d like to ask you about, so respect, in my notes here I have it listed as the cheapest concession you can make. And at face value, this makes perfect sense to me. My question is how do you express that respect? What are some ways that you have, and let’s take out maybe some of the complex cultural differences, right? Where it might be very different if you’re in the penthouse chairman’s suite at Mitsubishi than it would be in other places, let’s just say. But in an English-speaking environment, Western environment, what are some of the ways you might express that respect? And if you want to expand first on what you mean by the cheapest concession, then we can do that too.
William Ury: Yeah. The other side’s dignity may not mean much to you, but it means everything to them. As you just mentioned, in China or in East Asia, where it might be their life. And so if you can give the other side simple, basic human respect. I’m not talking about, a lot of people confuse respect, “Oh, they’ve got to earn my respect.” No, I’m talking about the respect that is everyone’s birthright just by virtue of being a human being. Respect, actually, the word comes from the Latin, respect, to see, again. Like “spect” as is spectacles. “Re” as in again.
Tim Ferriss: Or spectator.
William Ury: And to see the human being that’s there. And so even if you’re dealing with a hostage taker, I don’t care who it is, that’s what police hostage negotiators do, is they give the person some respect. That’s the way you connect with human beings. That’s the currency. That’s the currency for actually making a connection. It costs you nothing, and it means everything to them. That’s why it’s the cheapest concession you can make. And maybe behaviorally, to go back to the first part of your question, the easiest way to give someone respect, the most basic way to give someone respect is to listen to them.
We think of negotiation as talking, but successful negotiation is far more about listening than it’s about talking. A persuasive negotiator is someone who’s a persuasive listener. Because when you listen to someone, you are seeing them, you are hearing them, you’re attuning to them. You ask them questions. What is it that you really want here? You’re showing interest in them. That is the basic level of respect. And in addition to that, it gives you a lot of information about what they want so that you can more effectively influence them to arrive at something that satisfies their needs and satisfies yours at the same time.
Tim Ferriss: Is there any, aside from listening, any particular advice you would give to someone going into an important negotiation in terms of ways they might indicate respect?
William Ury: Well, like you, you learn a few words of the, you learn as you teach, how to learn languages very quickly. Learning a little bit of their language, the basic formalities of their language. That’s a sign of respect.
Tim Ferriss: It goes a long way.
William Ury: It goes a very long way. And I mean, just going back to Chávez for a moment, the first time I met him, I said, he asked me what was my advice. I said, “Why don’t you sit down and talk with the opposition?” And he said, “Oh, they’re traitors. They tried to mount a coup d’état. They tried to kill me. I would never talk to them.” And so I said to him, “I understand you don’t trust them, right?” He said, “Absolutely, I don’t trust them.” I said, “Let me ask you something. Is there anything that they could do tomorrow morning that would be a sign of respect? That would be a sign that maybe they’d change a little bit and maybe they were worth talking to. Anything that they could do?” He said, “Yeah,” he said, “they own the private TV station, so they could stop calling me a mono on national television.” And a mono is —
Tim Ferriss: Is monkey.
William Ury: A monkey. And he took it as kind of like a racist insult. And he even grimaced his face.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, not, in most places, a compliment.
William Ury: Right. And what I realized in that moment, it’s about respect. His feeling that intense disrespect. And so that led to a whole process where we tried to negotiate a whole set of ways in which to try to deescalate the crisis. What were signals of respect that the other sides could give each other that would change the atmosphere? And even just having a conversation about what the other side would see as respect and disrespect helped calm the situation down a little bit so we could move forward.
Tim Ferriss: And a situation like that, maybe it’s not the best example, but I imagine you’re being sent not as an emissary, but a mediator of sorts, facilitator in a lot of situations, and this is an opportunity to define what this is, but BATNA, or the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. How does this fit into your strategizing or thinking about circumstances in Venezuela or circumstances in any situation that comes to mind?
William Ury: Yeah. BATNA is an acronym that Roger Fisher and I coined back in Getting to Yes for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It’s your best course of action if you cannot reach agreement. It’s your plan B. If you’re negotiating a job interview, if you can’t get this job interview, you’ve got another job interview. If you can’t sell to this one client, maybe you have another client and it’s your alternative. And it turns out to be extremely important in negotiation, because in negotiation, we often make the mistake of thinking, okay, I want this agreement, and our focus is on the agreement.
But it turns out that paradoxically, one of the best ways to prepare for that negotiation is to think through ostensible failure. Ask yourself the question before you go into the negotiation. What am I going to do to satisfy my interests if I am not able to reach agreement with the other side? And sometimes people don’t like to go there because, well, that’s negative thinking. That’s actually alternative positive thinking. It’s like, what’s your alternative? What’s your BATNA? And if you do that, I mean, imagine, go back to the job, imagine next week you’ve got one job interview and it’s the only one you got and you’re going to be negotiating about your salary. Imagine how that negotiation is going to go if you have no other alternative.
But imagine if you take the intervening time to research, what are you going to do if you don’t get that job? Will you continue looking? Are you prepared to move sectors? Are you prepared to make a lateral move? Are you prepared to go back and get some education? Whatever your BATNA is, maybe you got another job offer. Maybe it’s not even such a great job offer, but you’ve got something in your back pocket. You’re going to negotiate with more confidence because you know have an alternative. So actually having a BATNA, in my experience, makes it more likely that you can actually reach an agreement, because it gives you that intangible confidence that makes all the difference.
Tim Ferriss: Totally. Are there any real world examples that come to mind or other hypotheticals?
William Ury: Yes. I was helping a client who became a very good friend of mine who was Brazilian, who was in a battle royal with his business partner over control of the company. And this was rather a large company, 150,000 employees to be precise, and they’d been fighting tooth and nail for two and a half years. Every board meeting was just a battle and there were lawsuits and it had gotten to the press, the character assassinations. I mean, it was the worst. And everyone thought it was absolutely impossible.
And this fellow asked me if I would come see him, and I went to see him. I went to his home and I began by asking him the first question before you get to the BATNA, which is “What do you want? What are your interests?” Because your BATNA is your best course of action for satisfying your interests. So I said, “Abelio, what do you want?” He said, “Well, I want a whole bunch of stock here and I want an elimination of the three-year non-compete clause. And I want the company sports team and I want the company headquarters.” And he had his list, just a really intelligent businessman. And then I said to him, “Abelio, I understand that, but tell me what do you really want?” And he looked at me as surprised. He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “No, I mean you, man who seems to have everything. What do you really want in life? What’s really at stake here for you?” And I don’t think he’d been asked that question before. It was a chance for him to go to the balcony.
And he paused for a while. There’s some silence. That’s the power of silence. And then finally he said to me, “You know what I want? I want liberdade,” which in Portuguese means freedom. “I want my freedom.” And the way he said, freedom, just the tonality of it. And that’s what you want to do is listen for the tone. It’s not just the words, but what’s the tone? I knew I’d kind of struck gold because it was like deep, it was really deep inside of him. And I had read his little bit of his biography and he had been kidnapped 20 years earlier and held in a coffin by a group of urban guerrillas for a week. He thought he was not going to make it. They had little air holes and they played this loud rock music, and it was only by a miracle that he was freed. But freedom really meant something to him. Because that’s often the case — we’re hostages of these difficult conflicts, and he was hostage of this conflict. And he said, “I want freedom.”
And then I said to him, “What does freedom mean to you, specifically then?” And that’s the thing you want to do. Once you get that interest, you want to ask, okay, operationally, specifically, what does it mean? And he said, “Well, it’s freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most meaningful thing in my life, and it’s freedom to make the deals I love to make. I love to make deals.” And then I asked him the BATNA question. I said, “Okay, Abelio, imagine that you can’t reach agreement with your business rival, who’s now your bitter enemy. Imagine you can’t, we don’t reach agreement. Is there anything you can do to advance your interest, which in this case is spend more time with your family and make more deals?”
And there was an aha for him, because he had assumed that he couldn’t advance his interest without settling this first, and he had to fight this. He was a fighter and he was going to fight this. But then no, then he realized that, “Okay, yeah, I’m not dependent on the other side for the interests that matter most to me.” And when you realize that, again, it goes back to the wisdom, the Stoics, when you realize it’s you, you actually have control over the things that matter most to you. Not the other side.
He went on a vacation with his family, he opened up an office, started to do deals, that actually allowed him to relax so that, in the end, we were able to make a deal.
Tim Ferriss: Now the follow-up question that hops to mind for me, I’m so curious, is what then happened? And we don’t have to get into all the specifics of the deal, but I could see on one hand possibility that he would have ultimate walk-away power in the sense that he would be less likely to make certain concessions, because he feels like he can address his interests elsewhere. So he could hold out indefinitely feeling like he can manage the endurance more than the other side. I can also see it going the other direction where he’s less attached to it and is more likely to make concessions. So what ended up happening, I could see that realization manifesting in a number of different ways.
William Ury: That was a really good point, Tim. In this case, I think it’s both. It both strengthened his sense of confidence that he could do it. And at one point he said to me, “Maybe I’m going to have to fight this for the rest of my life.” And this conflict was going to go on for at least another seven years, because that’s how long he was going to be chairman of the board. But I think in the end it was the second thing, which is he relaxed on it. And I had to keep on reminding him because he was very reactive. And I’d say, “Remember what you told me you really want is your freedom, right?” Because we get so attached. He was so attached to these things. In the end, I mean, I met with the representative of his business enemy. I went to Paris and it was in France and over a restaurant. I met him. He said, “Come and meet me.” We went to lunch at the restaurant. And this fellow, who was a French banker, a very distinguished French banker, asked me, “So why are you here?” Because this thing hasn’t been settled in two and a half years. The lawyers, I bet. And I said to him, using his language, French, I said, “Parce que la vie est trop court,” because life is too short.
And that wasn’t what he was expecting. And I said, “Yeah, because it’s to kind of help everyone go to the balcony. I said, “Life’s too short for these conflicts in which everybody loses. I mean, these guys are losing their time, their families are suffering. The employees are suffering from divided loyalties. Just think of all the losses here besides all the money going to lawyers and everything.” And so he said, “So what would you do?” And I said, “Well, if we could just agree for both of our friends,” it wasn’t like we were adversaries. It was mostly like, let’s help our friends settle this. You just reframe the situation. Both of our friends want their freedom to go on with their lives, freedom from this dispute. And they both want their dignity. They can’t afford to be seen as losing.
Tim Ferriss: And William, just a quick question, to the extent that you can describe it, could you explain the dynamic just so I have some understanding? So you’ve got Abelio, the chairman, and then there’s somebody else who’s also at odds with this person —
William Ury: He’s the principal shareholder.
Tim Ferriss: I see.
William Ury: The French entrepreneur was the principal shareholder, and there’d been an agreement that at some point control would shift to him. And they were fighting over control over this company.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
William Ury: And this was a company that had been founded by Abelio. My friend and client with his father. It was Latin America’s largest retailer. It was a supermarket chain.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. And Abelio brought you in to try to help the situation.
William Ury: He brought me in, actually, his daughter and wife, who were very concerned, brought me in.
Tim Ferriss: How often does that happen? I would imagine it’s —
William Ury: That’s the third time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine you get brought in by the third side.
William Ury: That’s it.
Tim Ferriss: Not infrequently, I would imagine.
William Ury: That’s it. The third side turns out to be key. It’s like the people around the conflict who have a stake, who are being affected by it, want to find some way to transform it.
Tim Ferriss: So I didn’t mean to interrupt. So you’re saying you said, “Life is too short. Let’s talk about our friends.”
William Ury: Let’s talk about our friends. And if we can give them both freedom and dignity, then maybe there’s a chance. And he looked at me and we had a very nice lunch, a little French meal. And then about an hour later, I got a call, I gave him my number as he said, “When are you going back to America?” I said, “I’m going back tomorrow morning.” I got a call about an hour later. He said, “Do you think you could stay tomorrow so that we could meet?” And I said, “Sure.” And so I went to see him in his office and we spent 45 minutes in his office trying to figure out this very complicated deal, what it would mean to give each man freedom and dignity, so that no one could be seen to lose.
In 45 minutes we came up with a little formula, and it was just very simple on the page there. That was a Tuesday. By Friday, we had both men in a law office in Sao Paulo, Brazil signing an agreement in which —
Tim Ferriss: That is fast.
William Ury: They ended it. We had a joint statement where they wished each other well. I accompanied both men to, talked to the leaders of the company to explain to them, executives, of why they’d done this. There was a press conference and it was over. And I asked Abelio later, I said, “How do you feel?” He said, “Well, I got everything I wanted.” He even got the things he wanted, he said, “But the most important thing is I got my life back.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, lawsuits. Seldom winners all around.
William Ury: And even the other guy was very happy too. So that’s the amazing thing is that it seems like it’s an impossible situation, seems like, but by treating it as a win-lose situation, there is no way out. But then looking for those possibilities, there was a way in which both sides could win, could benefit, that could get their freedom and their dignity. And the community, the third side, actually the families and the company could also benefit. So it was a win-win-win, a win for everybody.
Tim Ferriss: What is a trust menu and how do you construct a trust menu? But what is a trust menu?
William Ury: Well, a trust menu is, trust is one of those things which is so important in negotiation. I mean, you’re always looking, I know, on the show, for efficiency. How can you do something more efficiently? Well, negotiation. What creates the greatest efficiency in negotiation is trust.
Warren Buffett, who I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a little bit, he once had a negotiation with a partner, a business partner, Charlie Murphy, over buying ABC, the television network. This was many years ago. And Buffett was going to put up $500 million, looked like the deal was going through. So Murphy called up Cap Cities USA, called up Buffett and said, “Warren, the deal’s going through. What are the terms?” This is on the phone. And Buffett said, “Well, Murph, you’ve probably thought about it more than I have. What do you think the terms should be?” And Murphy just said all the terms. Buffett said, “Fine,” end of negotiation. 30 seconds, $500 million negotiation.
Now, it turned out that it was a very good deal for both sides. ABC was later sold to Disney. But the trick was, or the secret was, that both men trusted each other such that they knew that it didn’t matter who proposed the thing. They knew that it would be fair for both sides. They knew, they had that degree of trust, and so they could operate at the speed of trust. Now that high degree of efficiency, otherwise it might take six months or it might never happen. So that’s the coin of the realm in negotiation. Question is, what do you do if you don’t have trust? And that’s where a trust menu comes in.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so let’s say we’re not starting with that level of trust.
William Ury: So oftentimes you’re dealing with high levels of distrust, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
William Ury: So the question is how do you get out of distrust? At least establish some working trust. You might not be the closest of friends or whatever it is, but because it’s best to work with people with whom you can have high trust. But oftentimes that’s not the case. Going back to just the example with Chávez, when he told me, for example, that “They could stop calling me a monkey on national television,” I said, “Okay. I know you don’t want to meet with them, but maybe we can build a trust menu.”
So the next night he delegated his right-hand person, who was his minister of interior, to meet with me who couldn’t afford to be seen to meet with the opposition. So I was just staying in a villa, in kind of a bed and breakfast, a posada, in the middle of Caracas, and there was a garden. At 11 o’clock at night the minister shows up, I put them on my balcony, and then in the garden I had some couple of the opposition figures, and my colleague, Francisco, and I shuttled back and forth all night trying to construct a trust menu. In other words, a pre-arranged set of signals, steps, that each side could take that were small enough. And it’s like each side, these are the kinds of things that would send us a signal of respect that know you can be trusted.
And then one person, like Chávez, picks one thing off that item and says, okay, he made a speech the next week, which is something the opposition asked him to do, saying to the people, “Do not physically assault or harass the media when they’re covering rallies.” Those kinds of things. And he did it. So then they did one thing that he had asked for on his list, and then he did one thing. It’s like little signals. You send one signal, the other person sends another signal, send one signal, another signal. These are prearranged, preorchestrated, and there are ways of beginning to rebuild trust or confidence that you can actually depend on the other such that you might then be willing to sit down together.
Tim Ferriss: Makes perfect sense. You mentioned Warren Buffett. So I’m going to segue to Warren Buffett here. And this relates to an interest that I have, a keen interest in saying no, different ways of saying no. The importance of saying no, how to say no. And this is from an interview that you did some time ago, but it talks about you’re meeting Warren Buffett for breakfast. And at one point, this is when he confided in me the secret to creating his fortune, lay in the ability to say no. This is now quoting Buffett, quote, “I sit there all day and look at investment proposals and say ‘No, No, No, No, No’ — until I see exactly what I am looking for. Then I say ‘Yes.’ All I have to do is say ‘Yes’ a few times in my life and I’ve made my fortune.” I’d love to hear, perhaps, how you approach no. And there are different ways to present no. The positive no, as one example.
And just how you’ve learned to think about no, because there’s Getting to Yes. And part of the reason that I found Getting Past No so seductive is that when I had my first job out of college, I was technical sales, selling storage area networks to CTOs, CEOs, et cetera, or attempting to, because there are seven-figure plus systems. And almost inevitably the first answer was always no.
William Ury: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So I found the title of the book very compelling.
How do you think about no? I know that this has been important in your life and I suppose in most lives, but how would you suggest people think about no, and then maybe you can give an example of how to deliver a no in a skillful way.
William Ury: Back to that breakfast meeting with Warren Buffett, because Roger Fisher and I, and Bruce Patton had just worked on Getting to Yes. He said, “Oh, yes is really a good word.” He said, “But in my line of business, no is much more important.” And it really stayed with me. It stayed with me. And then I wrote Getting Past No because people had asked about getting yes, yeah, but what if the other side says no? So that was the thing.
But then I thought, there’s a trilogy here. There’s a third book here, which is really to do justice to no, because no is a really important word. Buffett is absolutely right. It’s almost like we have a right arm and a left arm. The two most basic words in the language are yes and no. Pythagoras said “The two words that are the simplest words in the language, ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ are the most complicated. They deserve the most study.” And that’s true. My whole life has been, in some ways, a study of the words “yes” and “no.”
And also, I noticed, and I had some difficulty sometimes saying no. So I thought, I always like to write about what I’m trying to learn. That’s the best way to learn about it. And so I did some real deep dive into it. And in the end, I came up with what I felt was an effective way to say no, which is what I call a “positive no.” And it’s like a sandwich.
A positive no starts with a yes, it’s a yes, no, yes. “No” is the meat in the middle. And it starts with a yes. And the yes is to what is that your deep interest, your deep strategy? You’re saying no, not just to say no, but to say yes to something deeper. And that’s what Buffett was saying to me. He was saying that in order to land on the right deal, that yes to the right deal, I have to say no to a thousand deals that are not quite right. And that’s how I make my fortune. So it all starts with the yes, actually. The effective no starts with a yes. It’s like the roots of a tree. If your boss is asking you to work over the weekend, you might say, thank you. I actually have a, I’m going to a wedding this weekend. Long promise, whatever it is. I’m not able to work this weekend. So it starts with a yes to what’s important to you. Therefore, I’m not able to work on the weekend. And then it doesn’t end there, it immediately goes to a yes on the other side. And this is what I can do to try and solve the boss’s problem. I can work more during the week. I can get Juan and Maria, Mary to work with me to try to get it done.
But the yes on the other side is some kind of either referral, solution, relationship, some kind of way to address the other side that is not a way of backing away from, it’s not a way. It doesn’t undermine the no, it’s just another, offers them another thing. So it’s a yes, no, yes, the no in between is calm. It’s not an angry, no, it’s calm, matter of fact, strong, no. No means no. What makes it easier for people to hear it, is the yes that precedes it. So they take it not as a personal challenge to the boss’s authority. They understand why you’re saying no. And then it’s followed by a yes on the other side, which might be, I look forward to doing business with you next time, whatever it is. But there’s a positive note that you end on.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, that was going to be my follow-up question about the yes at the end, because I could see this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about and practicing for trying to refine for a decade plus now, which is how to say no, and do so in a way that is sustainable. In other words, if you have a lot of incoming, if you have a lot of inbound people asking you to, who knows, could be any number of things. Host a charity fundraiser, come speak to XYZ, invest in this and that, help my brothers GoFundMe campaign, because he’s trying to help people with ALS, whatever it might be. There could be a million of these coming in. And I could imagine if your closing yes is sort of a contingency commitment, that those things would really snowball.
William Ury: Oh, absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: So there are times that you just have to say, “Here’s my positive reason why, therefore I cannot say yes.” What are some ways that you like to close on a positive note? Is there any language that you have found just to be ready from the quiver, go-to language for yourself, for others?
William Ury: Yeah. I mean, one is you want to make sure that the no is not taken personally. Because oftentimes people don’t like to hear the word no —
Tim Ferriss: Very often.
William Ury: And that makes it hard to deliver for us. So you could say, look, my policy is I don’t do this. I’m taking us about, you put a very strong yes in the ground that they understand that the no is nothing personal, right? And then the yes on the other side might just be, I love you, to your brother. It’s just some, so the last note is not no, it’s yes, but it could just be a yes to the relationship. How about I wish you much success with the fundraiser. It’s just something that, it’s not like you don’t have to come up with a contingency plan for everyone, no. Don’t even think about that. But look, if a coworker asks you for help, you could say, “Look, I’ve got an important work priority boss has asked me to do, so I can’t help you. But so-and-so might be able to help you.” Or, “I can’t help you now, but in three weeks I could help you.” And you’ve got to be careful. It’s got to be absolutely right if you’re true.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Be careful with the snooze button.
William Ury: Right, right. Got to be really careful about that. You don’t want to leave a door open that you’re going to regret later, but in some cases it’s just like a pleasant kind of relationship affirming, “Wishing you success. Godspeed.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There’s one that I received. I don’t want to misattribute it, but I want to try to give attribution. I think it was Guy Kawasaki a million years ago who’s a very well-known, he was known as an evangelist from Apple Computer and has gone on to do angel investing, and many other things, has written some great books. And I asked him for something. I can’t remember what it was. This is back when I was just cutting my teeth. Early days, just moved to California. And he replied, and Guy, I apologize if this wasn’t you, but it’s a good line either way. It was basically a very short, like, “Really, sorry, I can’t make this work. I’ll raise a glass from the sidelines with an exclamation point.”
William Ury: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: And that was it. But it was delivered in such a way that it was less bruising than then it could have been otherwise, right?
William Ury: That’s it.
Tim Ferriss: That strikes me as a good example.
William Ury: That’s it. The yes on the other side is an investment in relationship. It’s a sign of respect.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s probably a helpful way for me to think about it too. How can you really underscore respect in that closing part?
Possible, the new book, How We Survive (And Thrive) in an Age of Conflict. What was the impetus for the reasons behind wanting to write this book?
William Ury: Our friend Jim Collins.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. All right. Say more, please.
William Ury: So what happened was five years ago I went for a hike with Jim, a mountain hike. Lions Lair was the name of the trail.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, that could mean a lot of things. He’s a pretty aggressive rock climber.
William Ury: He is. He is. He’s great. And he likes to ask good questions, as you know.
Tim Ferriss: I do.
William Ury: So we were hiking up there. It was the end of November. Blue sky, Colorado. And he turns to me and he says, “William,” he said, “Do you think you could sum up everything you’ve learned in your life in one sentence? Everything you’ve learned about negotiation in one sentence that could be of use to us in these tumultuous times?” And I looked at him and he said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “Well, Darwin could, and I can give you the exact sentence on page 300 and so of The Origin of Species where he sums up the entire theory of evolution.” And I love challenges, and I love simplicity. I’m always trying to how do you synthesize something down?
So I took his challenge and I went back and thought about it. And our next hike, I talked it through. I said, “If I had to do it in one sentence,” I went back. I’ve always loved the Latin phrase, “Omne trium perfectum,” which means “Everything that’s in threes is perfect.” There’s something about three. So I was trying to think of what are the three things that I would pass on for these difficult times of the things that I’ve learned. The three most basic things that hang together as one. And so I tried it out on him and then he said, “Okay, now you’ve got the sentence. Write the book.” And that’s the origin of Possible.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, I can’t let that go as a cliffhanger. What was the sentence? What did you start with?
William Ury: So the sentence was, taking these impossible conflicts that we’re facing now, I mean the world’s getting so disrupted, whether you mentioned the Middle East, Ukraine, the US polarization, whatever it is in business, there’s so many conflicts going on. It seems to be polarizing, paralyzing us, poisoning us. I was trying to think of, so the first thing I said, the path to possible, the first thing is go to the balcony. It all starts with us. You got to influence yourself first. You got to go to the balcony so you can see the larger picture. And we were hiking up. I said, it’s that balcony view that you can see as you’re looking. That huge view of them looking down at the valley. It starts it’s an inside job. It’s self-mastery. That’s where it begins. So go to the balcony was number one. And then once you’ve influenced yourself, then you can influence the other. And then I thought about going back to getting past, no, building a golden bridge, which is making it as easy as possible for the other side to do what you want them to do by listening, by being creative, by being attracting, by writing their victory speech. All of those things go into building a golden bridge. Actually, it’s a phrase that comes from Sun Tzu, The Art of War, which is leave them a way out. I frame it positively as where’s the way forward? Actually, you’ve got to be audacious. It’s not just an ordinary bridge, it’s a golden bridge. It’s attractive. It’s persuasive. You’ve thought through what really, really they want, what their fears are and so on, so you’ve really built them that golden bridge. So, influence yourself to influence the other.
Then the third part of the whole is influence the whole, which is take the third side, which is remember, because in negotiation, in conflict, we always tend to reduce everything to two sides. It’s labor against management. It’s sales against manufacturing. It’s husband against wife. It’s the Arabs against Israelis. There’s always a third side, which is the surrounding community, the people around who are affected by it. That’s a great power if you can harness it, so taking the third side, the side of the whole. I think that’s our oldest human heritage for dealing with conflict is using the third side. I’ve seen it in so many indigenous cultures and we have to reinvent it today. My sentence was, “The path to possible is to go to the balcony, build a golden bridge, and take the third side.” Influence yourself, influence the other, influence the whole.
Tim Ferriss: All right, I love every aspect of that and I want to [home] in on one, and this is sort of a meta question that I wanted to explore with you related to your comment on the inside job. My experience, and I’m by no means a master negotiator, but I’ve done a fair amount, just all the stuff that I’ve done is —
William Ury: We all have, we all negotiate every day.
Tim Ferriss: We all negotiate. My experience has been that the better you get at negotiating and a core component of it is creativity, the more you can harness seeing option C instead of just A versus B for yourself, not just for mutual gain, but actually in your own decisions as well. I wanted to ask you about inventing creative options, finding creative options. It could be for mutual gain, it could be for personal direction. I’d love to hear, if you’re open to it, an example of something in the negotiating world, and then if you have one, an example from your personal life or individual life where similar techniques or lenses helped you to see something that maybe wouldn’t have been obvious.
William Ury: In any situation, I always think about it, you’re negotiating, imagine that you’re negotiating something with someone. There’s a pile of gold on the table and that gold represents the amount of gain, potential gain, that lies in whatever deal you can make or whatever relationship you can create. Well, so often what you find is that people walk away from the table either without a deal, they leave all that gold on the table, or they walk away just taking away part of the gold.
The question is how do you get all the gold? The answer is by using our creativity, tapping into our innate potential for creativity. There’s a part of our brain that judges and evaluates that. We’ve all been in meetings where you get these killer phrases, like you raise an idea and they say, “Oh, we’ve done that before, or we’ve never done that before or that won’t work, or that’s the craziest idea,” whatever it is. Yeah. After that, no more creative ideas come out of that meeting. Our ability to invent means separating the cognitive process from evaluating, which is really important, from the cognitive process of inventing, of creating.
That’s the whole essence of brainstorming, which is, you have one golden rule, which is no criticism is allowed. You try to come up with as many ideas as possible, and then after you get all the ideas out, then you can start to criticize and develop and improve them, but if you try to do both at the same time, you find you don’t get very far. You can do that.
For example, if I go back, you said an example from the negotiation world. If I go back to my friend Abelio and that particular conflict, it was freedom and dignity. For dignity, we had to figure out a way in which no one could really tell who won, because, for example, three are non-compete. What if they were tangling around? Is it going to be two years, half a year, whatever it is, how much it would be for each thing? We had to just have no numbers. I said, “No, look, freedom means zero, zero non-compete, because that’s what freedom means.” But it’s just so that there’s no numbers and it just disappeared. Or, for example, the stock, what was the discount? No, it was going to be one voting stock for one other stock, so, again, so that analysts could not tell who won. We tried to remove numbers from it.
Tim Ferriss: What about seeing creative options outside of negotiation for yourself? Has it translated in that way for you?
William Ury: Well, for example, right now I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical. I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical, so I like to think, “Okay, what would I do on a sabbatical? Be creative. Should I learn something new? Should I learn a new language? Should I go off on a hike, a pilgrimage, walking somewhere?” I take out a piece of paper and I try to write down things, but even better, what I love to do for creativity is I go for walks or hikes, because in nature, somehow when you see beauty and particularly you get these vistas, I find it enhances creativity. Then I ask friends, “What would you do?” And just investigate it, so come up with — the essential thing of creativity is come up with a lot of possibilities and then start to winnow it down, but don’t just [home] in on one because the best way to make decisions is to have a lot of options, and then you could start to introduce criteria to try and figure out which one will satisfy you the best.
Tim Ferriss: I can’t resist the temptation to ask about your exercise and self-care routines. This is going to seem like a very non sequitur, but you mentioned the hiking. If you don’t mind me asking, what is your current age?
William Ury: 70. Just turned 70.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so you do not look remotely close to 70. I don’t know how much of that is just out of the box Powerball winner of genetics versus other things. I have no idea. Maybe it’s an amazing skincare routine. I don’t know, but you seem to be in very, very good shape. What are some of your non-negotiable or ideal self-care routines? What do you do to stay active and fit?
William Ury: Well, the first thing, which I’ve already indicated, is walking. I’m an anthropologist by training and walking is what made us human. Our ancestors walked all the time. We were nomadic hunters and gatherers for 99 percent of our time, so I love to walk, and I love to live in a beautiful place, nature if I can, but if I’m in a city, walk in a park or whatever, but there’s something about — or even just walk down the street, but I love walking and I love hiking, climbing mountains, and so I do that every single day religiously. It doesn’t even have to be — it’s ingrained. It doesn’t even take a lot of discipline because walking, hiking, I think of the satisfaction that it brings. It not only obviously brings physical fitness because it’s really good for you just as a thing, but emotionally it helps me go to the balcony. It calms me down. It lowers the stress level. Intellectually, mentally, it leads to creativity. It’s where I do my best ideas. I walk all my books. That’s where the ideas often come from.
Tim Ferriss: You mean that you ideate on your books when you’re walking?
William Ury: I ideate. Yeah, I ideate. That’s what I mean.
Tim Ferriss: Are you recording anything when you walk?
William Ury: I do record. I do record. I used to have little Post-its. I used to write on those things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that sounds more labor-intensive.
William Ury: But now I just record. Yeah, I just record because things come. It’s quite amazing. This creativity is like you listen, you tune in, you’re relaxed. Beauty inspires. I find beauty. Especially, I work in a lot of difficult, heart-wrenching conflicts. Beauty is kind of like a balm. It’s just kind of like it regulates the nervous system.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it really is.
William Ury: Then, the last thing, of course, it does is it has a spiritual level, which is like beauty. It’s like wonder, awe. What I find is walking actually covers the bases and so that’s my foundation. Then, of course, I try to do some little weights and I do some yoga or some stretching, but those I’ve added on and I realize. I experiment with those over the years, but the foundation of it is I hope to walk to the day that I die. That’s my dream.
Tim Ferriss: How much walking, generally, are you doing? An hour a day? Is it two hours a day? Is it somewhere between? What does it look like? When do you go for your walks? I know this is getting very nitpicky, but I’m curious.
William Ury: No, no. Well, I go for a walk whenever I can, but I usually walk first thing in the morning if I can. I like to go for a hike. I have my favorite hikes, especially ones that get me out alone and where people aren’t around, walk where I — I always find my favorite hike of a canyon with a stream or something. It’s like a little Zen rock garden effect. It just lends itself to more creativity. I also walk with friends later on. I try to do my meetings. If someone wants to meet with me, let’s go for a walk. I live on a lake, we walk around the lake, and so for me, a three-walk day would be great. I walk between, I would say, an hour and a half and maybe could be sometimes as much as three hours a day or whatever it is, or it could be even longer.
Speaking of the Middle East, I had a crazy idea 20 years ago of who walks, why they fight. I had an idea of creating a walking trail through the Middle East and it’s 20 years. It’s been a lifelong hobby, passion, but it’s called the Abraham Path and it’s a long-distance path where we’ve developed, maybe at this point, about 1,500 miles of trails to walk because long — I said this is a hundred-year project, but it’s just to get people walking, because when you walk, you talk, you talk differently. You can work out conflicts while you walk because what’s interesting, you’re walking, you’re side by side facing a common direction, and that’s the direction you want to go in negotiation, side by side, trying to solve a problem. You’ve got a horizon there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, as opposed to this pugilistic —
William Ury: You got it.
Tim Ferriss: — sitting across a table, facing each other like two predators. That’s a different vibe.
William Ury: There’s a reason why in negotiation, especially in rational negotiations, they talk about walks in the woods. Oftentimes, that’s where breakthroughs come is when the negotiators go for a walk in the woods.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. I have found similarly, the more I walk, the better I do. I have thought often about what makes us human on so many levels is walking, lots of walking.
William Ury: It’s true. It’s true. By walking bipedal, that’s what allowed our brains to expand, so walking made us human. You’re absolutely right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’d like to, if you’re open to it, discuss a little more what seems to be a core competency in negotiation, but in life in general. Life is a whole string of different negotiations, whether it’s with yourself or with other people. That is uncovering underlying interests because what people ask for versus what they actually want/need, the older I get, the more continually amazed I am at how different those two sets can be, the cover story of what people say they want versus what will actually make them happy, and sometimes they don’t know. It takes some detective work to really uncover it.
Could you give another example of uncovering interests? Because I remember, for instance, and I’m really pulling this from a faulty memory, but this example, I don’t know if it was in one of your books or maybe somebody told me about it, but there was a real estate developer who wanted to buy this land to develop a shopping center or something like that. There was this farmer or someone who owned the property and he didn’t want to sell and it went on and on and on and seemed to be intractable.
It came down to ultimately he was afraid to be forgotten. They were like, “What if we put a statue up right in the center of the shopping center that basically would last forever and assure your legacy?” He was like, “Great,” and then they did the deal, but they were stuck in all the surface level stuff for a long time prior to that. Are there any stories that come to mind about uncovering interests, not just positions?
William Ury: I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard like that where it just turns out to be something simple. I’ll give you an example from years ago. I was invited in as a mediator between a separatist group in Indonesia that had been fighting for 25 years for their independence from Indonesia, thousands of people dead. I was meeting the head of the guerilla group and the leaders and so on in Geneva. We were about to meet with the foreign minister of Indonesia the next day, but I began by asking them, “I understand your position, it’s independence, but if I may, why do you want independence? What’s your interest?”
There was this long silence, like they struggled with it. “What do you mean, independence? It’s self-evident. We want independence.” I said, “But why do you want independence?” They struggled with it for a long time. I finally said, “Okay, is it you want your own place in the UN? Is it because you want political autonomy, the ability to have your own parliament and run things? Is it economic? Do you want control over your natural resources? Is it cultural? Do you want your kids to go to school in your own language?”
We started to unpack it, and the reason why it was so important, because they’d never — it just struck me. Here, they’ve been fighting for 25 years, thousands of people dead, and they knew what their position was, but they hadn’t really thought through what their strategic interests were and prioritized them. The reason why that was so important was because of BATNA. Their best alternative to negotiate agreement was to continue the war.
I said to them, “Are you going to win this war?” They said, “Oh, the Indonesian army is much stronger. 10 years, we’ll still be fighting this war.” I said, “Is there any way that you can pursue your interests without even giving up your aspiration for independence? Is there any way you can meet your interest in autonomy and control over natural resources and so on?”
That began a whole conversation with them. They went back into their movement for a couple years, and lo and behold, a few years later after that tsunami, they came back and they negotiated an agreement with the Indonesian government, which gave them autonomy, control of their natural resources, kids can go to school in their own language or they can practice their own religion, everything. There was an election, and the governor and the vice governor came from this independence movement. They advanced their interests without surrendering their ultimate aspiration, but they moved it forward. That, to me, just showed just the enormous value of always digging behind positions because we’re like that. We’ve got our position. It becomes self-evident, but oftentimes we know our position, but we don’t know what our interests are, and so we miss the chance to advance our interests.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was just thinking as you were telling that the longer something has persisted, whether it’s a grudge against your parents or some strife with your significant other or a 25-year conflict, the interests may have been clear in the beginning, but somewhere along the line they got replaced with the position. Then, it becomes this faulty proxy where it’s like, well, it’s self-evident. It’s like, well, hold on a second. Is it self-evident? It’s like the label of the thing but not the thing. I can see how the longer something has lasted, the more likely perhaps it is that the interests have been lost along the way, even if they were extremely clear at some point.
William Ury: In Getting to Yes, we tell this story about these two sisters quarreling about an orange. They quarrel about the orange, and finally they cut the orange in half. One sister takes her half and peels it and uses the half a peel for baking a cake. The other sister takes her half, peels it, and eats the half of the fruit. They end up with half a peel for one and a half a fruit for the other when — because their position was the orange, but if they’d looked behind to what their interests were, which were in cooking and eating, they could have ended up with a whole peel for one and a whole fruit for the other.
Tim Ferriss: That is great. I need to go back. I need to go back and read Getting to Yes. I bought that as soon as I could. As soon as I could buy it, I got it, and then Getting Past No followed up and then Possible will be the next edition. What do you hope that Possible does? Or what would success constitute for you with this book? It comes out, a year later, how do you know if it’s been a successful book or not?
William Ury: Well, here’s my dream. My dream is if I was a Martian anthropologist right now looking at humanity and I look at and say, “Wow, we live in this time of paradox because we have so much abundance, so much potential, so much opportunity to make the world better. We’ve got the technology, we’ve got AI, we’ve got all this stuff.” At the same time, what’s in our way? There’s no limit to what we could do. There’s no opportunity we can’t realize. There’s no problem we can’t solve if only we can learn to work together. What’s in the way are these conflicts that seem impossible, that seem polarizing and paralyzing.
The reason I wrote Possible was to indicate from my own experience of spending 45 years wandering around the world as a negotiator and an anthropologist trying to understand these things, seeing where people took impossible situations and found possibilities. My hope is that we’re all possiblists. Anyone listening to this podcast, you’re a possiblist. You believe in human potential. My hope, my dream is that there’s a worldwide league of possiblists who are tackling the world’s toughest problems.
That could be your personal issues. It could be issues with yourself, issues with your partner. It could be professional work life issues. It could be in the community, or it can be in the larger world, the political world, but using, harnessing our full human potential for what you have here in this podcast, which is our full human potential for curiosity, our full human potential for creativity, and our full human potential for collaboration to transform these conflicts, because if we can transform these conflicts, we can transform our lives. We can transform our world. That’s my dream.
Tim Ferriss: Amen. Well, that’s very well said, very well put, and a worthwhile dream to have. I think, William, this has been an incredible conversation. I’ve been looking forward to it for some time, and people can find the book wherever they find their books. Possible: How We Survive (And Thrive) in an Age of Conflict. I have found your books so incredibly useful in the past, so incredibly practical. I really do hope people check it out, and, furthermore, take the last thing that you just said very seriously, because as you said, a lot of this is an inside job working from the inside out.
It’s highly compatible with a lot of the things, completely compatible with much of what has been, I would say, well-received on this podcast in the past, Stoic philosophy, et cetera. I think your craft and your genius is a living example of, in some senses, separating what you can influence from those things you can’t. Then, being very creative and I would say as sort of a precursor, a believer in the possible, in crafting potential solutions, not just ways out, but ways forward. Really appreciate all the time today. People can find you on Twitter, I guess all the cool kids call it X now these days, @WilliamUryGTY, as in Getting to Yes. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any requests of my audience? Anything else that you’d like to add before we wind to a close?
William Ury: Yes. Well, first of all, this has been a huge pleasure to speak with you, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Likewise.
William Ury: I’m a big fan of your podcast and of, I believe, this possibilist mindset. My humble request to your listeners is take this possibilist mindset, this belief that I think infuses this podcast, of this belief in human potential and being curious and being creative and being collaborative, and apply it to your own difficult conflicts. You’ll see that if you can go to the balcony, you can do that inside job, that self-mastery, that Stoic philosophy, and if you can then build the other side of the golden bridge, something that works for both sides, and if you can take the third side, engage the larger community for the benefit of the community, if we can do those three things, balcony, bridge, third side, those are our human, I believe, innate superpowers. If we can awaken them, then I think we can create the world that we want for ourselves and the people that we love.
Tim Ferriss: William, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation. I’ve taken all sorts of notes. It was a real pleasure to research for this because it just triple reinvigorated my interest in everything that you’ve written about and all of the many adventures that you have had. I really appreciate the time and for sharing your life and techniques and perspectives on the show, so thank you for that. For everybody listening, we will link to everything in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast to everything mentioned. You could find Possible: How We Survive (And Thrive) in an Age of Conflict anywhere you find your fine books. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to other people, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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