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Experts Guides

Kim Scott

Author of Radical Candor, former Google and Apple executive

Kim Scott wrote Radical Candor, which Lenny's Podcast calls the most referenced book on the show; it has sold over a million copies and been translated into 23 languages. Before that she led the AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick teams at Google. Radical candor, she says, is what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time. By her count, 90% of us make 90% of our mistakes in ruinous empathy.

Lenny's Podcast 00:22 00:30 00:45 03:45 07:08

Frameworks
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Problems
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Ideas
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Recordings
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Books
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Updated

Key ideas

Scaling

When your team is growing

Leadership

Radical Candor

Care personally and challenge directly at once. Scott puts 90% of our mistakes in the nice quadrant, not the mean one.

We're so worried about not hurting someone's feelings or not offending them that we failed to tell them something they'd be better off knowing in the long run, and that is what I call ruinous empathy.
Scott, on the quadrant nobody claims Watch at 06:16
Read the framework

Disagreements

Lead with candor, or lead with empathy?

Kim Scott

treats silence as the expensive failure. Ruinous empathy, withholding a hard truth to spare someone's feelings, is in her account the most common and most damaging communication mistake, and the fix is to challenge directly while showing you care.

Ann Handley

starts from the reader. Put yourself in the audience's position first, and let warmth and generosity earn the right to be heard. Directness that arrives before trust reads as an attack, whatever the speaker intended.

From Radical Candor

Sources