As they say, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. I do, however, agree with Jon Gordon's general premise in The No Complaining Rule (as I understand it…I have just read through the chapter titles and jacket, and glanced through the book). On this point, my favorite maverick, Annette Kyle, led one of the most impressive organizational transformations I've ever heard of at a loading terminal in Bayport, Texas (This is described in the prior link, and in detail in The Knowing-Doing Gap and Weird Ideas That Work). One of the actions that Annette took was to sew "no whining patches" on employees uniforms, on the theory that if something was wrong, people should try to fix it rather than complain about it, if that didn't work, they should come to management and they should try to fix it together. When the problem was impossible to change, however, then her view was that it was a constraint that they just needed to work around. In such cases, constant complaining about something they couldn't change, Annette argued, was poison because it made people depressed and diverted energy away from problems that they could solve.
Yet I do worry that this new book, and even Annette's patches, are the kind of thing that can backfire in the wrong hands, unwittingly stifling people from pointing out problems that need to be fixed. The no complaining rule may create fear of being labeled as a complainer or whiner, even when a person has legitimate concerns. People need to feel psychologically safe to speak-up, or you end-up with disasters like the Columbia and Challenger space shuttle accidents. See this post about "shooting the messenger," and I especially recommend following-up on Amy Edmondson's research if you are interested in this issues of speaking-up and psychological safety.
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