Author
William Ury
The anthropologist of negotiation, who spent forty years studying how people say no and still reach yes.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
William Ury trained as an anthropologist at Harvard and co-founded its Program on Negotiation. With Roger Fisher he wrote Getting to Yes in 1981, then spent the following decades on the harder cases the first book left open: Getting Past No on difficult counterparts, The Power of a Positive No on refusing without damage, and later work on mediation in political and ethnic conflicts around the world.
His field work took him from boardrooms to civil wars, and the books carry that range lightly. Ury writes for the person who will be in a hard conversation tomorrow, not for the theorist, and his most quoted ideas, going to the balcony, building a golden bridge, are memorable because they were tested where the stakes were real.
The signature
Ury's signature is the third side: the idea that in any conflict there is a perspective beyond the two parties, and that the negotiator's power comes from stepping into it, calming themselves first, and giving the other side a way to say yes that they can live with. His voice is warm and unhurried, and it treats a hard no as the start of the work rather than the end of it.