Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations

Getting Past No is William Ury's answer to the question he says he was asked more than any other after co-writing Getting to Yes: what do you do when the other side simply won't cooperate? Where the earlier book focused on principled negotiation between reasonably willing parties, this one is built specifically for negotiating with people who are angry, entrenched, deceptive, or simply uninterested in a joint solution — a stubborn boss, a hostile counterpart, an intransigent bureaucracy, or an outright adversary.

Ury frames the challenge around five distinct barriers that block cooperative negotiation: your own reactive impulses under stress, the other side's negative emotions, their tendency to dig into a fixed position, their underlying dissatisfaction with any agreement (often rooted in fear of losing face or the idea simply not being theirs), and their inclination to use power to dominate rather than negotiate. Rather than a single technique, Ury proposes a five-step "breakthrough negotiation" strategy that corresponds directly to these five barriers, built on an idea borrowed from Japanese martial arts: instead of meeting resistance with force, the skilled negotiator goes around it.

Before detailing the five steps, the book opens with a prologue on preparation, arguing that most negotiation outcomes are determined before the conversation even starts — through clarity about your own interests, options, standards, alternatives, and proposal. The five steps that follow — don't react (go to the balcony), don't argue (step to their side), don't reject (reframe), don't push (build a golden bridge), and don't escalate (use power to educate rather than defeat) — each get a full chapter of specific techniques illustrated with real, often high-stakes examples.

The book's most memorable extended illustrations include a detailed salary negotiation walked through step by step, and a forty-seven-hour hostage standoff at a New York hospital in which a detective successfully applied breakthrough principles to secure the release of hostages unharmed. Ury closes with the parable of seventeen camels that cannot be divided among three sons until a wise woman lends an eighteenth camel to make the math work — a metaphor for how the breakthrough strategy itself often functions as the "extra" element that makes an otherwise intractable negotiation solvable, without requiring either side to fully capitulate.