Radical Candor

Book Rating: 2 of 5

Radical Candor is Kim Scott’s book on business-ing. Who is Kim Scott and why should you care what she thinks about the topic of business-ing? Well, she’ll tell you:

• She worked for someone who worked for Steve Jobs.
• She worked for Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In).
• She worked with/for? Dick Costolo (Twitter CEO)
• She worked for Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google
• She ran her own startup (which appears to have failed)

Radical Candor is largely an appeal to the authority of the people that Kim worked for. If you think those people are successful and ran good companies then you might like her book. If you can stand to read all the words in it. Kim’s book is really damn long for a fairly shallow amount of content. My second edition of the book weighs in at 270 very small print pages. The book has very long sentence structure and repeats a lot of the same stories. I was pretty bored reading it most of the time. The book could easily have been edited down to two thirds its length and lost no impact.

I think the book took some criticism for its name. I actually think Kim’s idea of Radical Candor is fine, but I can easily see how someone could read the title and use it as leverage for being a asshole. One thing I don’t like about the title is the concepts in the book aren’t that radical. The book is a more about hen the manor in which we communicate with each other so I find the title a bit of a poor fit. But in Kim Scott’s defense if she had named the book more boringly or descriptively I don’t think she would have sold nearly as many copies. So in that sense the book is named well.

In this review I’ve taken a bit of a cheap shot at Kim Scott and made a very (in my opinion) fair critique of its style. How do I feel about its content. Well, I think its ok. The book is mostly preprocessed good advice you’ll get from most business-ing books

• Treat others with respect and be honest with them.
• Address problems quickly because they won’t go away.
• Establish processes and norms for how the company makes decisions.

The book is of course more detailed then that but this is the general upshot. There are well documented flow chart style processes laid out in the book your company could adopt and an I think the quality of these processes are fine. I have no strong feelings about them. So if you follow Kim’s advice in Radical Candor I don’t think it will harm you or your company. All in all I think the advice of the book is fine. Its just the packaging that sucks.