Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, first of all, I would not put Steve Jobs in the same category as Ray Dalio and Elon Musk. I mean, Steve Jobs could be obnoxiously aggressive, but mostly I would say he built such good relationships with his direct reports that when he got cancer, Tim Cook offered to give him half his liver. And I don't know of a word to describe that other than love. These were real human relationships. When I worked at Apple, you could see Steve and Johnny talking. You could tell these people cared about each other. Now, radical candor gets measured not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear. And I think that Steve had built a team around him of people who didn't mind rather what other people would consider obnoxious aggression. But I think in the context of their relationship, it was understood as care. I'll give you an example of that from my own career, not that I am comparing myself to Steve Jobs, I think I'm a much gentler person, but sometimes I develop relationships with people. And part of that relationship is that we push each other pretty hard. So there was a person who I had worked with for a long time, for many years. He had followed me from one company to another, and we were localizing a product and he kept conflating Slovakia and Slovenia, and I corrected him once. I corrected him twice the third time, I was like, did Slovakia, not Slovenia dumb ass. And he started laughing, and that was fine in the context of our relationship, but I realized that the people around me, I was silencing them. They were like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to make a mistake. Kim's going to call me a dumb ass." So I had to pause and say, "Look, I respect this person enormously, and I like this person enormously. We work very well together." And so I think that sometimes people have relationships with others and they have those relationships in public and other people misinterpret those relationships. Steve Jobs was not perfect. He made all kinds of mistakes, but he was no Ray Dalio or Elon Musk, who I would say make far more and worse and more egregious mistakes. And I think you're raising a really important point. You're raising a point, which is that there's this false dichotomy. In fact, the new biography of Elon Musk falls into this category. I like Walter Isaacson's work a lot, but he falls prey to this in his biography of Elon Musk, which is there's this notion that we have to choose between being a total jerk but really competent or really nice but incompetent. And those are not our two choices. That's the whole point of radical candor is that there's this other way that works better and doesn't hurt people. I think that's the key takeaway there is you can be even more successful if you lean into the care deeply. In theory, they could have gotten more out of their people if they made it clear they really care about them. And there's plenty of counter examples of incredibly successful people who are very caring leaders, and it's not as much fun to tell stories about that. And so we don't as often.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.