Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…You must read it. It's all about Bridgewater. I always thought it was problematic. I had no idea just how problematic it is. Put that book in the show notes one of the best business books I've read in the last decade. Wow, that is high praise. Yes, I will read that. And so I guess for people that aren't familiar, like Bridgewater, they encourage, they have a system called Dots where they tell people, you must give hard critical feedback after every meeting, publicly. Not after the meeting, in the meeting, publicly. And it's recorded on, it was, I think they changed it since, but it was recorded for posterity on video. And sometimes, in fact, true story, shortly after I left Google, I was approached to work at Bridgewater in a management capacity, not in an investment capacity. And so I called someone I knew who worked there and he said, "Let me give you an anecdote." He said, "The other day there was a meeting and there was a woman who in the meeting who had made a mistake and everybody just piled on. The criticism was very personal. There was no core about the criticism. It was like, these are your personality attributes that make you a useless human being. Kind of terrible feedback until she started to cry and the whole meeting was recorded and then they emailed a recording of the meeting out to the whole company, including all the people who were not in the meeting saying, this is an example of how to have..." So I would say that is deep, dark, obnoxious aggression. That is not radical candor. That is horrible.…

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