Dr. William Ury


William Ury co-founded Harvard’s Program on Negotiation where he currently directs the Global Negotiation Project. He is co-author (with Roger Fisher) of Getting to Yes a five-million-copy bestseller translated into over twenty languages. He is also author of the award winning Getting Past No: Negotiating with Difficult People and Getting to Peace Over the last two decades,

Dr. Ury has served as a negotiation advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from corporate mergers and wildcat strikes to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. He cofounded the International Negotiation Network with former President Jimmy Carter, a nongovernmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. During the 1980’s, he helped the US and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert an accidental nuclear war and most recently, served as a third party in the civil conflicts in Aceh, Indonesia, and Venezuela.

Dr. Ury was trained as a social anthropologist with a BA from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He has taught negotiation to executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers around the world. His consulting clients range from Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Ford Motor Company to the Treasury, the State Department, and the Pentagon. His work has been widely featured in the media from The New York Times to the Financial Times, and from ABC to the BBC.