Author
Kim Scott
The manager who turned one blunt, kind piece of feedback into a two-axis framework for saying the hard thing.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Kim Scott led operations teams at Google, including AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick online sales, and later joined Apple, where she taught a course on management at Apple University and coached executives at companies including Dropbox and Twitter.
Radical Candor, published in 2017 and revised in 2019, grew from a moment at Google when her manager told her plainly, after a good presentation, that her verbal tics made her sound stupid. The book's two axes, care personally and challenge directly, became a widely used vocabulary for feedback, and she co-founded a company of the same name to teach it.
Just Work, published in 2021, extended the argument to bias, prejudice and bullying at work.
The signature
Scott writes in stories, most of them her own failures, and names things managers recognise but had no word for: ruinous empathy, obnoxious aggression, manipulative insincerity. Her signature is the order of operations, solicit criticism before you give it, care before you challenge, and the refusal to treat silence as kindness.