his mother was deaf—but he was unable to persuade the engineering team to prioritize certain key features in time for launch. When I showed him Aristotle’s framework, he exploded. “I don’t know how I could have put any more emotion into my arguments,” he said, his voice choked with frustration. He’d explained to them his personal connection to the

There are several reasons why it makes sense to begin building a culture of Radical Candor by asking people to criticize you. First, it’s the best way to show that you are aware that you are often wrong, and that you want to hear about it when you are; you want to be challenged. Second, you’ll learn a lot—few people scrutinize you as closely as do

Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos

you must also care deeply about people while being prepared to be hated in return.

The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough—and when it is; when they are not going to get that new role they wanted, or when you’re going to hire a new boss “over” them; when the results don’t justify further investment in what they’re working on. Delivering hard feedback, making hard calls about who does what on

When you fail to give people the guidance they need to succeed in their work, or put people into roles they don’t want or aren’t well-suited for, or push people to achieve results they feel are unrealistic, you erode trust.

Generally, by the time one of your direct report’s poor performance has come to your attention, it’s been driving their peers nuts for a long time.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, paid close attention to retention and talked warmly about people who’d been with Apple for a long time.

In my experience, people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right make the best bosses. That’s because they keep learning and improving, and they push the people who work for them to do the same. A boss’s Radically Candid guidance helps the people working for them do the best work of their lives.