Taste Note - Amazon Business Negotiating Best Sellers
Getting Past No: The Breakthrough Method for Deals That Have Gone Hostile
A Kurums Book Taste review of Getting Past No for the negotiations that Getting to Yes assumed away - stonewalls, attacks, and tricks.
Why this book fits Kurums
Getting to Yes drew the map for reasonable parties; its co-author wrote this one for everyone else. The counterpart who stonewalls, attacks your proposal as insulting, or games the process is not an exception in commercial life - in disputes, collections, and hostile renewals, that is the baseline. Ury's five-step breakthrough strategy is the standard method for exactly those rooms.
For the Kurums Law audience the pairing with Bargaining for Advantage is deliberate: Shell system-izes the normal case, Ury handles the adversarial one, and together they cover the negotiation shelf's two weather conditions.
What the book argues
The strategy is built on a single insight: in difficult negotiations your natural reactions - striking back, giving in, breaking off - are precisely what the other side's behavior invites, and all three lose. Breakthrough negotiation is the discipline of doing the opposite of what feels natural, in five steps. Step one: go to the balcony - do not react; name the tactic to yourself, buy time, remember your interests. Step two: step to their side - disarm by listening, acknowledging their point and feelings, and agreeing wherever you honestly can; you cannot argue someone out of a corner, but you can make the corner unnecessary.
Step three: reframe - instead of rejecting their position, treat it as one answer to a shared problem and ask problem-solving questions ('why is that important to you?', 'what would you do in my position?', 'what if we...?'). Tricks and stone walls are reframed too: test the stone wall by taking it seriously ('interesting - why that number exactly?'), and name games gently to make them unusable. Step four: build them a golden bridge - make saying yes easy by involving them in drafting the solution, satisfying unmet interests, and helping them save face with their own constituents; victory speeches are written for the other side.
Step five: use power to educate, not escalate - if they still refuse, demonstrate the cost of no-deal with your BATNA rather than threats, keep the bridge open the whole time, and aim for mutual satisfaction rather than victory, because in ongoing commercial relationships you will negotiate with this counterparty again. The book's compact drills - naming tactics, reframing scripts, face-saving formulations - make it the most immediately usable of the Harvard negotiation set.
Key ideas, translated to your desk
Go to the balcony
The pause is the tactic. Name what is happening, watch the negotiation from above, and let the provocation expire unanswered.
Build them a golden bridge
People do not resist agreement; they resist defeat. Draft the yes so it reads as their idea and their win when they report it upstream.
Power educates, it does not punish
Deploy your BATNA as information - 'here is what happens if we cannot agree' - while keeping the offer open. Threats corner people; consequences inform them.
Use it at work
- Script your balcony move for the next hostile call: the naming phrase, the time-buying question, the recess line.
- Open dispute responses by stepping to their side in writing - acknowledged points first, disagreement second.
- For a stuck deal, draft the counterparty's victory speech and work backwards to the terms that let them give it.
- Rehearse presenting your BATNA as education, not ultimatum, before any escalation meeting.
Read it if
- Your negotiations include disputes, collections, or counterparties who play games.
- You or your team react to attacks in kind and deals die of the escalation.
- You have Getting to Yes internalized and need its wartime appendix.
You can skip it if
- Your negotiations are cooperative and standards-driven; Shell covers that terrain better.
- You want deep hostage-negotiation psychology - Voss goes further on tactical empathy.
- You reread it recently; the five steps are the whole architecture and they stay memorized.
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