William Ury is co-founder of Harvard's Program on Negotiation and currently directs the Global Negotiation Project. He is the author of the just-published The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No & Still Get to Yes and co-author (with Roger Fisher) of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, a five-million-copy bestseller translated into over 20 languages. Ury is also author of the award-winning Getting Past No: Negotiating with Difficult People and Getting To Peace.

Over the last 25 years, Ury has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from the boardroom to international crises - 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 U.S. 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 was trained as a social anthropologist, with a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard.