I'll definitely give this a read. I think I'm going to disagree with it. But I will give it a chance.

Frankly, I think that honesty/transparency are buzzwords that have little to no meaning. So the authors will have to convince me.

But the whole approach seems cynically disingenuous in most of the places where it's applied.

I also think that criticism doesn't deserve a place in the honesty/transparency group. Criticism is an inevitable fact of life that will happen to you at some point, and you will have to deliver it at some point, if you are a functional adult. Honesty and transparency are entirely optional. They are not in the same category at all, in my opinion.

I encountered different types of criticism and management when I was around 10 years old at one of these things people call music festivals. They are practice gulags. You practice for 10 hours a day, and you work with a bunch of different teachers. It's every 11-year-old's definition of "festival."

But one of the nice things is that you get to work with a lot of different teachers. I remember working very hard on a particular bow stroke called Martele. The hammer stroke. I was really bad at it. And one of my teachers was quite honest with me about how much I sucked at it. And to be fair, I did suck at it. It didn't work. At all. So he told me that it sucked, and that I wasn't trying hard enough and I should practice more, and he was going to spend his lesson smoking a cigarette while I tried to perform 100 martele strokes in a row on the same pitch.

You can call that honesty. But you can also call that a number of other things. I had a different teacher a few weeks later who listened to me trying to do this, and his response was, "Well, this really isn't working out very well for us, now is it? What should we do when things aren't working out well no matter how hard we try? Well, we need to try something different, don't we? Let's try something different."

The reason I'm bringing that up as an example is because this is actually not uncommon in the tech world.

The first guy was being honest. Totally honest. I sounded like garbage. No doubt about that. The second guy was slightly dishonest, but he was more to the point of solving the problem. And, in fact, I got a lot better at that particular stroke of the bow rather quickly.

I'll have to read the book, and I definitely will. And I don't like to leave unread books around. Especially ones backed by research. I hope I was clear to qualify my statements by being based on my own personal experience, rather than pretending that I've done any scientific studies.

I would also argue that there's no such thing as constructive "honesty". Construction inside a team setting is always assumed to be honest. No one goes around telling people they did a great job when they sucked at it. Unless that person is a really bad manager. But teammates don't do this in reality. So I can't see how this really makes sense.

Like I said, I'll read it. But I think it's questionable on the face of it.

Maybe we are living in some sort of crazy place where honesty/transparency/criticism and just a healthy trusting relationship with your boss are all the same thing. But I don't think so, and pushing things in that direction is bad for all of us.

On the other hand, I'm willing to be wrong.