Managers have to be able to say yes too, otherwise their organisations would shrivel up and die. But no is the norm, the basic rule, while yes is for special occasions.
Which word is more useful to successful people: Yes or no? I realise the question sounds moronic. Both words are useful: it depends on what is being asked.
Yet if I think of the questions put to me in the past 24 hours, a pattern starts to emerge.
"Are you free for lunch with a client of mine in September?" "In that case, how about a coffee with him at some point in 2008?" "Have you read my e-mail?" "Can I get my belly button pierced?" "Can I stay up and watch Big Brother?"
The answers to these requests are no, no, no, no and no, respectively. The only question that I have answered yes to in the last few hours was "would you like a Diet Coke from the vending machine?"
For people in any position of authority, the ability to say no is the most important skill there is. All good parents must say it often. So must all good managers. No, you can't have a pay rise. No, you can't be promoted. No, you can't travel club class. No, we are not going to an offsite workshop to discuss living our core values.
Of course, managers have to be able to say yes too, otherwise their organisations would shrivel up and die. But no is the norm, the basic rule, while yes is for special occasions (yes, you can have a pay rise, yes your idea is brilliant).
Put like this it sounds banal, though actually it's heresy. An illogical love of yes is the basis for all modern management thought. The ideal modern manager is meant to be enabling, empowering, encouraging and nurturing, which means that his default position must be yes. By contrast, no is considered demotivating, uncreative and a thoroughly bad thing.
Even sensible managers claim to support this view. Allan Leighton, who, as chairman at Royal Mail, is boldly saying no to the demands of workers (who are in turn responding by saying no to delivering my mail), professes to believe in yes. At a recent breakfast, he was heard sneering at "the incredible no man" and "business prevention units". A visit to Amazon.com confirms how widespread the yes cult is. There are many basic titles - Yes!; Getting to Yes; The Power of Yes and The Answer to How is Yes. For mathematical minds there is: Three Steps to Yes and The Sevenfold Yes. And for religious ones there are God Said Yes and Finding Your Greater Yes. For rougher tastes there is F**k Yes, while for specialist audiences the choice is limitless, including Oh Yes, You Can Breastfeed Twins.
By contrast the no offering is thin and the titles are apologetic: The Power of a Positive No. Unfortunately, it isn't a positive no we are after. We need to know how to say a negative no with confidence.
Last week, I was sent a book with a plain white cover and the word no on the front in huge black type. Underneath it read: "The only negotiating system you need for work and home."
Hooray, I thought. Maybe no is about to make a comeback. Alas, on closer inspection, the book turned out to be a negotiation manual, of which there are too many already.
The paucity of advice on saying no is particularly bad when you consider how hard the word is to say.
By contrast, yes is a doddle, as it's usually what the other person wants to hear.
In fact, I should probably come clean and say I haven't just said five nos. I didn't say no to the 2008 coffee as I couldn't face being quite that blunt; instead I failed to reply at all. And as for the Big Brother request, what I actually said was: "no, no, I said no! No! Oh for Christ's sake all right then, do what the hell you like. Just stop making that horrible noise."
"XX and YY are the proud parents of a baby girl (still nameless!), who arrived on deadline at 4.51am weighing in at 8lb 15oz! XX tired but happy."
The delivery of every office baby is marked by the delivery of an office e-mail that is long on exclamation marks, lame puns and inessential detail, but is quite nice nevertheless.
Last week, the baby e-mail took a less pleasant twist when the chief executive of Vizi Media, a Californian agency, e-mailed his contacts book to tell them that his number two had had a baby.
After the regulation detail, he added: "Our industry is often really hectic, a bit selfish at times, so it's good for our souls to perhaps turn to something that will allow us to point ourselves in the right direction. A new child into this world is one of those occasions."
This chief executive needs to learn how to say no. No to cluttering up the inboxes of strangers. No to spiritual spam. No to the faulty logic that the birth of a child to someone we don't know points our souls in any direction at all, let alone the right one.
The only thing to be said in his defence is that he did say no to the most regrettable new trend in the office baby e-mail: to attach a digital photo of mother and baby sweaty and shattered minutes after the delivery - a sight that used not even to be deemed fit for the baby's father, let alone his entire office.
