Summary of William Ury: The walk from “no” to “yes”, Negotiation Strategies

Jose Miguel Chirinos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc6yi_FtoNo

Blog Post Negotiation

Analyzing William Ury

Summary of William Ury: The walk from “no” to “yes”

Summary:

A video posted by TEDtalksDirector in YouTube,(2010) entitled “William Ury: The walk from “no” to “yes”” is a small talk with a duration of almost twenty minutes lead by William Ury a genius in negation strategies and third party mediator. This video touches with examples important topics that are shown in the book “Getting to Yes”. 

 The speaker opens with a story about a man that leaves 17 camels to his 3 sons and how the three sons worked out a way to split the camels the way their father had told them, something that seemed impossible for them at first. By opening with this story he grabs everybody’s attention since the story is funny, interesting and related to the subject matter. Next, he started talking about negotiation, and he mentioned that he started traveling years ago to countries were political situations were such that negotiations were necessary like Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and shamed but not surprised to say, Mr. Ury also went to Venezuela. He said that the secrets in all those cases is us, the people around the conflict. In fact, he shared an example of a time he went to Africa and spent time with communities with old traditions. Thus, he saw how they deal with the problems of the community; they all sit and start debating for hours, days, this totally refers to bargaining positions. Moreover, Mr. Ury mentioned the criteria procedure of this study refers to two sides of the conflict. However, usually people do not see both sides of an argument. That is, us, friends, family, surrounding community, all this have to be taken into consideration for a negotiation or a mediation from “no” to “yes”. He also mentioned how important is controlling our emotions and how this is totally related to the conflict. In the video, Mr. Ury keeps demonstrating through examples how people can use as a technique what he called “Go to the balcony” or “ take a walk”, both of these techniques that he had applied in several studies and cases like the confrontation in the Middle East. He mentioned that a “Path of Abraham” could be a solution in that case. Since cultures have some similarities, they could adopt the European formula of a common economy. Consequently, the short conference creates models efficiently able to follow during the negotiation and mediation process.

                      

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