About this item
The author of the world's best-selling book on negotiation draws on his nearly fifty years of experience and knowledge grappling with the world's toughest conflicts to offer a way out of the seemingly impossible problems of our time.Conflict is increasing everywhere, threatening everything we hold dear - from our families to our democracy, from our workplaces to our world. In nearly every area of society, we are fighting more and collaborating less, especially over crucial problems that demand solutions.With this groundbreaking book, bestselling author and international negotiator William Ury shares a new "path to possible" - time-tested practices that will help listeners unlock their power to constructively engage and transform conflict. Part memoir, part manual, part manifesto, Possible offers stories and sage advice from Ury's nearly 50 years of experience on the front lines of some of the world's toughest conflicts.
About the Author
co-founded Harvard's Program on Negotiation where he currently directs the Global Negotiation Initiative. He is the author of (2007) and co-author (with ) of , a five-million-copy bestseller translated into over twenty languages. "No other book in the field comes close to its impact on the way practitioners, teachers, researchers, and the public approach negotiation," comments the National Institute on Dispute Resolution. Ury is also author of the award-winning (released in paperback under the title The Third Side) .Over the last 30 years, Ury has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from corporate mergers to wildcat strikes in a Kentucky coal mine to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. With former president Jimmy Carter, he co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. During the 1980s, he helped the US and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert an accidental nuclear war. In that capacity, he served as a consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House. Most recently, Ury has served as a third party in helping to end a civil war in Aceh, Indonesia, and helping to prevent one in Venezuela. Ury has taught negotiation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats and military officers around the world. He helps organizations try to reach mutually profitable agreements with customers, suppliers, unions, and joint-venture partners. Ury is also co-founder of the e-Parliament, which offers the 25,000 members of congress and parliament around the world an Internet-based forum in which they can learn from one another other about legislative solutions that work and together tackle global problems such as climate change, energy efficiency, and terrorism. His most recent project is the Abraham Path Initiative, which seeks to address the growing chasm between the world of Islam and the West by creating a permanent path of tourism and pilgrimage in the Middle East that retraces the footsteps of Abraham, the unifying figure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ury is the recipient of the Whitney North Seymour Award from the American Arbitration Association and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament. His work has been widely featured in the media from The New York Times to the Financial Times and from ABC to the BBC. Trained as a social anthropologist, with a B.A. from Yale and a Ph. D. from Harvard, Ury has carried out his research on negotiation not only in the boardroom and at the bargaining table but also among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the clan warriors of New Guinea.
