Not So Radical

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity – Kim Scott (St. Martin’s Press)

Kim Scott’s resume reads like a road map of Silicon Valley. She’s been involved in a handful of startups, has worked at Google, YouTube and is  on the faculty at Apple University. Through her current company Candor, Inc. she has coached the CEO’s of Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter and a number of other Silicon Valley businesses.

Therein, may be the rub when it comes to her book, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Like so many of the current crop of business/leadership books that offer up guidance, training and advice about how to do a better job of engaging your staff, I am not certain how this stuff translates to the whole wide world that exists outside of Silicon Valley.

Scott espouses a simple two part approach boiling down Radical Candor to two prongs; you have to Care Personally and Challenge Directly. Inside the slick walls of Silicon Valley this concept may be radical, but in the real world to survive in business, it’s simply called…business. When you’re operating a small business you simply don’t have the luxury of playing games, you learn pretty quickly that survival calls for two pretty simple things; being direct and being honest. If you clearly don’t give a crap about the folks you hire they leave and if you don’t help them to be successful by managing them up or out, then your business will fail. I’m not sure if there is much that’s radical about that thought process.

What I did take away from Radical Candor, notably for businesses out here in what I call the “real world”, meaning will aren’t Google, Apple or Twitter, is that one of the most mission critical pieces of successfully leading a business is to focus on the hiring process. Know exactly what you stand for, what your values are, what your mission is and finding the best people to fit into that paradigm is the fastest way to grow and succeed.