The Power of a Positive No: Save The Deal Save The Relationship and Still Say NoBook
by William Ury
Who uses, recommends or left The Power of a Positive No: Save The Deal Save The Relationship and Still Say No, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
Executive coach for product leaders; previously a product partner at GV and a product manager at Google.
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. Saying no gracefully and firmly is one of the most important skills for a product manager to develop. This is the classic guide for learning to do so.
From “Best Books for Product Managers [2026]”, his standing list, introduced as “the 44 books I’d consider essential to any PM’s bookshelf”. Every book links through amzn.to and a Bookshop.org affiliate id (/a/83161/).
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.