Community Online Academy

William Ury

William Ury, co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, is one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation and mediation. William is co-author of Getting to Yes, a fifteen-million-copy bestseller translated into over thirty-five languages, and the author most recently of Getting to Yes with Yourself. Over the past four decades, William has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from the Cold War to Venezuela to the Middle East. Recently, William has served as a senior advisor to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to help bring an end to one of the last and longest-running wars in the Americas. William is also founder of the Abraham Path Initiative, which seeks to bring people together across cultures by opening a long-distance walking route across the Middle East that retraces the footsteps of Abraham and his family. He has a TED talk about the Abraham Path, entitled “The Walk from No to Yes.” He is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project where he directs the Korea Negotiation Initiative (KNI), a collaborative inquiry into the obstacles to a negotiated resolution of the Korea nuclear crisis and how to overcome them.