To Negotiate Better, Start with Yourself

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The coauthor of the classic book Getting to Yes has new advice on how to negotiate, designed for a world that feels more conflicted than ever. William Ury, cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, has come to learn that the biggest obstacle in a negotiation is often yourself—not your opponent. Ury, who also coined the term BATNA, explains the latest thinking from his research and consulting. He shares his tried-and-true methods for overcoming yourself to negotiate better outcomes at work and in life. Ury wrote the new book Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nikish. When was the last time you prepared for negotiation? Maybe it was working out how to get a project done with a coer. Maybe it was negotiating a big purchase, possibly
0:55.9	something more substantial in global trade or international relations. Chances are, if you did prepare, you may well have spent more time and energy thinking about the
1:05.8	opposing party than you did about yourself.
1:09.8	Today's guest speaks from a long and storied career in high stakes negotiations and he says
1:15.0	too often our biggest obstacle is ourselves.
1:18.9	William Urey is a co-founder of the Harvard Program on negotiation, he co-wrote the influential 1981 book Getting to Yes.
1:27.2	He has played a role in peace negotiations, mediated talks between estranged business partners and
1:33.2	trained countless executives and managers on best practices.
1:37.1	Through all that, he has learned that gaining perspective on yourself
1:41.2	is an underutilized and powerful tool, especially now in a world
1:46.2	that seems to be in more polarizing conflict than ever. His latest book is
1:50.7	possible how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict.
1:55.4	William, great to have you on the show.
1:57.0	Oh, it's a great pleasure, Kurt. I want to start by asking how you think about conflict because I think so many of us still think of it as a
2:15.9	negative scary thing.
2:18.0	Yes and I used to think the same way myself Kurt but you know I was trained originally as an anthropologist before I went into the field of negotiation and as an anthropologist I came to appreciate that conflict is actually essential to change, to growth, to evolution, to how we as individuals and organizations develop,
2:38.3	and the best decisions often result from surfacing different points of view, getting everyone's ideas on the table,
	...

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