It is a true privilege to write a foreword for such an inspiring and pioneering book as Erica Ariel Fox’s Winning from Within. The pleasure is particularly great since I have known Erica for many years and watched her as she developed and honed the ideas that are now crystallized in this lively and lucid introduction to the inner realms of negotiation.
More than thirty years ago, Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton, and I had the pleasure and privilege of collaborating on codifying a cooperative approach to negotiation in a slim volume called Getting to Yes. We sought to inspire readers to change the game of negotiation from its customary form of winning and losing to a game in which both sides could benefit. This approach, commonly known as “win-win,” helped change the way people understand and practice negotiation from business to diplomacy to debates around the kitchen table.
In the three decades since, perhaps the most important lesson I have learned in my work as a mediator and negotiation advisor is that the biggest obstacle to success in negotiation is not the other, however difficult they might be. It is ourselves. The true difficulty lies within in our all-too-human tendency to react—to react impulsively out of fear or anger. The foundation of successful negotiation, I have found, is learning how to “go to the balcony”—to a mental and emotional place of perspective, calm, and self-control. I made the importance of going to the balcony a principal theme of Getting Past No, a book that I wrote twenty years ago.
Over the years, however, I have come to realize just how difficult it is for people to go to the balcony, and even more difficult, to stay on the balcony during their conflictual interactions with others. Each of us has a strong tendency to be controlled by our destructive emotions and thoughts and then to react impulsively in ways that do not serve our long-term interests. In other words, we tend to “fall off the balcony.” My clients and readers often report this and ask me repeatedly for help on how to stay on the balcony. While the basic techniques—of stopping, naming what’s going on, and keeping one’s eyes on the prize—can be very valuable, they need elaboration and reinforcement, particularly in the problematic relationships that many of us encounter every day.
What I have increasingly come to appreciate is that success in getting to yes with others can go only so far unless we also engage in a parallel work, an internal work on ourselves that accompanies the external work we do in the world. To be successful in traveling the external behavioral path to agreement, we need to travel an internal psychological path as well. We need to get to yes not only with others, but first and perhaps foremost with ourselves, strange as this may sound. In order to go outside into the world to relate successfully with others in challenging situations, we need to go inside first to relate successfully with ourselves. For how can we expect to influence others effectively if we cannot first influence ourselves?
This is where this seminal book by Erica Ariel Fox makes its contribution. Winning from Within invites us to think about negotiation in a new way, before we get to the table or ever talk to the other side. It opens the door for us to look inside at how we negotiate with ourselves. Erica offers us an anatomy of the negotiation within, giving us a working vocabulary of the Dreamer (in business language, the CEO), the Thinker (the CFO), the Lover (the VP of HR), and the Warrior (the COO). These are our inner negotiators, what Erica calls the Big Four, all led by the Captain with the invaluable help of the Lookout and the Voyager. And there is much more, presented in lively and stimulating language, and accompanied by vivid and inspiring examples that bring the inner characters and practical methods to life.
In the 1980s, when Getting to Yes came out, the world we lived in was in real need of a new way for people to solve problems together. Principled negotiation provided one such alternative. Today, our world is in need of road maps for people to understand themselves so they can make wise and conscious choices about their lives and their leadership. We need a practical and accessible set of tools that explains how we operate to enable us not only to broker deals with others, but to make peace with ourselves. Until we can understand and engage with ourselves, our deepest aspirations will elude us—from meeting our potential for professional performance to creating a secure and sustainable peace in the world.
Winning from Within offers us such a road map. I truly hope that it will help readers understand and practice both leadership and negotiation in a more effective, more centered, and more satisfying fashion, whether in the corporate offices or in public policy debates, or simply in talks among family and friends. I am convinced that, in order to change the outer game of negotiation, we need to learn to change the inner game of negotiation. This pathbreaking book by Erica Ariel Fox offers us a great place to begin. I hope that you enjoy and benefit from it as I have!
WILLIAM L. URY
COFOUNDER, HARVARD NEGOTIATION PROJECT