Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
person / likes
“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.”
book / recommends
“Yes, I've mentioned a couple. Please do buy Radical Respect, I believe that the more novels people read, the better. People often ask me, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of Radical Candor and read more novels? This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other people, to understand the emotional signals that might be coming at you. I mean, some of my favorite novels are Middlemarch. I try to reread that all the time. Anything that Toni Morrison wrote, the Bluest Eye is one of my favorite, but also Song of Solomon. It just such a brilliant writer and will help you enter into the lives of people that you haven't entered into. I think that Orlando by Virginia Woolf is another one of my favorites. And Robertson Davies, the Deptford Trilogy is an incredible set of novels to read. I'm cheating now and giving you three.”
book / recommends
“Yes, I've mentioned a couple. Please do buy Radical Respect, I believe that the more novels people read, the better. People often ask me, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of Radical Candor and read more novels? This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other people, to understand the emotional signals that might be coming at you. I mean, some of my favorite novels are Middlemarch. I try to reread that all the time. Anything that Toni Morrison wrote, the Bluest Eye is one of my favorite, but also Song of Solomon. It just such a brilliant writer and will help you enter into the lives of people that you haven't entered into. I think that Orlando by Virginia Woolf is another one of my favorites. And Robertson Davies, the Deptford Trilogy is an incredible set of novels to read. I'm cheating now and giving you three.”
Claim ledger
16 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“Yes, I've mentioned a couple. Please do buy Radical Respect, I believe that the more novels people read, the better. People often ask me, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of Radical Candor and read more novels? This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other people, to understand the emotional signals that might be coming at you. I mean, some of my favorite novels are Middlemarch. I try to reread that all the time. Anything that Toni Morrison wrote, the Bluest Eye is one of my favorite, but also Song of Solomon. It just such a brilliant writer and will help you enter into the lives of people that you haven't entered into. I think that Orlando by Virginia Woolf is another one of my favorites. And Robertson Davies, the Deptford Trilogy is an incredible set of novels to read. I'm cheating now and giving you three.”
02 / uncertainty
“Many, I don't know about you Lenny, but a lot of my best professional relationships began with a good respectful disagreement.”
03 / belief
“There are chapters in the book about how to be a great upstander, how to be a better colleague, and there are chapters in the book about how to become part of the solution, not part of the problem when you're the culprit. And I think we all find ourselves in all four of those roles at different moments in time, and I don't think there's any one group who can solve this problem.”
04 / belief
“I think that the best thing to do is, for me anyway, is I start by sharing stories from my career and stories when I was a jerk.”
05 / belief
“I think just remember, you do not have to choose between being successful and being a jerk.”
06 / belief
“I think probably what I would do, and I would love to hear what you would've said to Bob too, I certainly don't have all the answers, but probably what I would've said is let's go back to the first time Bob handed work into me with shame in his eyes.”
07 / uncertainty
“In fact, I did an analysis of Dalio's book Principles and it's like a, I don't know, 3 or 400 page book.”
08 / evaluation
“I think that also as a woman, I think there was something extra, as my teenage children would say, there was something extra for me because the sort of likability- competence bias that a lot of women face pushed me, especially early in my career, in the wrong direction on challenge directly.”
09 / prediction
“You're going to lose your top performers. And I think very often people are afraid to tell someone on their team when their work isn't good enough because they're afraid of losing them.”
10 / recommendation
“It's much harder to admit the manipulative insincerity part. And that is really why I'm here talking to you because I want all of your listeners to avoid making that mistake because it's the most painful and the most common mistake that I think leaders and not just leaders, I mean all of us make this mistake in all of our relationships.”
11 / recommendation
“People often ask me, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of Radical Candor and read more novels? This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other people, to understand the emotional signals that might be coming at you.”
12 / evaluation
“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.”
13 / evaluation
“There's a lot of evidence coming out of University of Chicago and probably other places, but that's the article I've read that there's more noise than signal in facial expressions and body language, especially if somebody is just a little square on a computer screen. But it also may be true in real life, like the phone actually may be one of our best communication innovations of all time because when you're talking to someone on the phone, you're listening to the words that they are saying to you, and that is really what you want to do in this moment.”
14 / evaluation
“" Now she's got my full attention. And some people might say it was mean of her to say I sounded stupid, but in fact, it was the kindest thing that she could have done for me at that moment in my career because she knew me well enough to know that if she didn't use just those words with me, and by the way, this is a really important point, she never would've used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps a better listener than I was.”
15 / prediction
“If you watch The Office or any show about problems at work or problems in any kind of relationship really, you're going to see a lot of episodes about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity. But I think the real rub comes and the fact that these, even though this is what we like to talk about, these two problems are what we like to talk about, these are not the most common problem.”
16 / recommendation
“It should always start with soliciting feedback and it should include more praise and criticism, but anyway, way without offering up shit sandwiches. So anyway, I think that the important thing for these conversations, these sort of two-minute impromptu moments of management, is to go into the conversation being humble.”