Book Review: "The No Complaining Rule"

"The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work" is Jon Gordon's fictional story about how to turn complaints into "solutions, innovations, and success." Though not based on an actual company, it was inspired by the successes one organization had eliminating rampant complaining.

Every worker knows how negativity can suck the life force right out of the office. It can start off as simple gripes but then morph into productivity-sapping bitch sessions making failure seem inevitable. According to a statistic cited by the author, negatively costs the U.S. economy between $250 and $300 billion every year. Also noted, negative emotions are associated with:

*Decreased life span and longevity
*Increased risk of heart attack
*Increased risk of stroke
*Greater stress
*Less energy
*More pain
*Fewer friends
*Less success

In short, complaining and negativity is bad and this is no surprise. But if we all know that it's bad, why does it persist? Even more to the point, what can we do about it? Answering that question is the purpose of the book. I won't give it away here but by the title of the book you can tell that it involves the banishment of complaining and the addition of tools and techniques to replace the negatively with positive habits.

Update: I let a friend whose office was experiencing a certain amount of internal strife borrow my copy of "No Complaining". He was initially a bit skeptical--wondering why a business book would be fiction instead of non-fiction. However two weeks later he reported back that he had read it over a long weekend, enjoyed it quite a bit, and had already begun implementing some of the lessons derived from the story.

Amazon link: The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work