Saying 'no' to an idea is better than saying nothing at all. We may fear rejecting another's idea in order to avoid conflict, but this fear is often counterproductive. Communicating your reasons for saying no can build and strengthen relationships with your customers and your employees.

This is just one of the counter-intuitive messages in Sweet Rejection: Cutting Out the Noise, a podcast conversation between Stanford Professor Bob Sutton and Henning Piezunka, assistant professor at the European Institute of Business Administration INSEAD).

As Piezunka further explains, #saying-no is often the start of the process that ultimately gets you to the right outcome, as long as you don't give up. "The precondition for that is that you keep the conversation going... So you need to have a way [to do that], even if the first conversation or the first interaction did not go the way you had hoped for." For another perspective on the importance of forging ahead to find success, check out this story of a serial entrepreneur. [1]

References

From the Desk of Eric Ries — July 2018, The Startup Way newsletter (private)