YouSaid · the spoken record

Kim Malone Scott

lines on the record: 126
first: 2017-04-03
most recent: 2017-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Killing it. So, anyway, Edwards is important to Google. We can agree on that. And so there was a big change, and the team wanted to do one thing, and Sergei wanted to do another thing. And Sergei said, okay, I understand why you want to do that thing, but why don't you put a few engineers on this idea, on my idea? And the team was having none of it. And Sergei at some point kind of bangs his fist on the table, and he says, If this were an ordinary company, you'd all be doing it my way. I just want a couple of you to try it my way. And he didn't even get that, you know, and he was frustrated. He was genuinely frustrated. But you could also see he was smiling, he was proud of himself for creating an organization that would stand up to him. And that was inspiring.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not always yelling. In this case, they were challenging and being willing to challenge authority and the authority sort of welcoming it. There was another time where I was in a meeting about the AdWords front end, and since AdWords is how Google makes 90, 90, not all, 99% of its money, a big percent. Yeah.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll never forget shortly after I joined watching Matt Cutz and Larry have this argument about something. I don't even remember what. But I really liked Matt. I had gotten to know him. And he starts yelling at Larry. And I was just looking at Matt and listening to what he was saying. And I was starting to worry, oh my gosh, Matt's going to get fired. And then I looked at Larry and he's just got this big grin. His whole face is lit up. And it was not such a productive way to have arguments that it was sort of inspiring.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other night I was a little, maybe I had a couple of drinks. I was feeling like I should only use lifts, but I'm in the habit of saying Uber, so I said, I'm going to take a Luber home.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three bad quadrants. I would say unfortunately what we're not going to call Kara the asshole, what we're going to call the obnoxiously aggressive quadrant, obnoxiously aggressive.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My experience. Yeah, I would say that Google, again, we didn't talk about one quadrant In the radical candor framework, all of life's problems, of course, can be distilled to a 2x2. So this is all. In the bottom right hand box where you are challenging directly but you're not showing that you care personally, that's obnoxious aggression. Yeah, also known as the asshole quadrant, right? Asshole quadrant. But we're not going to call it that and we're not going to call it that for a very important reason. Why? The reason is that I don't want you to use the framework to, it's tempting to start writing names in boxes at this point, right? Who's obnoxiously aggressive? Who's manipulatively insincere? Who's ruinously empathetic? Don't do that. We all spend time in all of these quadrants. Use the framework to judge not yourself or other people, but the way a conversation is going and to get it going in a better direction.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are people who are on the fast growth trajectory and those are the architects, but you also need electricians in your building. And if you want the lights to turn on, you don't need a C electrician, you need an A. I mean, you don't need a C architect, you need an A plus electrician. And this kind of made sense to me, but Derek wasn't signing up to lead the team. I just let the other guy do it the way he wanted. Derek quit, and pretty soon everything goes to hell. The baked goods stop. And the whole team failed. And I realized I had just undervalued the job that Derek was doing. He was not a B player by any stretch. He was an A plus. He loved his job. So stuff like that. Stuff like happening all the time.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, Derek loves the work, and the company's going well. And eventually we need to grow. And so I say to Derek, do you want to lead the team? Do you want to lead this customer support team? And he said, no, I don't, because what I really want to do in life is to be on Broadway. This was a startup in New York. And so what I really want to do is leave work at 5 o'clock and go be in these off Broadway performances. And so I hired this other guy to lead customer support who really didn't care at all about customer support, what he really cared about. He wanted to be the CEO. He was the superstar, super, super fast growth trajectory. And Derek comes, and this guy's the guy I hired, his opinion was that customer support work was so boring you had to hire B players or C players to do it. And this obviously was upsetting to Derek, who came charging in my office talking about Anne.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're going to fictionalize, you may as well make it all men who screw up and all women who do wonderful work, right? So anyway, Derek actually in this case didn't screw up. It was me, the woman who was screwing up, to be fair. So this is a equal opportunity screw up situation. So Derek was customer service guy. Love doing the customer service work. People sent him baked goods. Forget about NPS. When your customers are sending you baked goods, that's when you know you're doing a good job.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Growth and change on your team. They want new challenges, new stuff. You got to make sure they're getting promotions fast, all that kind of stuff. Your rock stars are the people, don't think about Ozzy Osborne or something like that. Think about the Rock of Gibraltar. They're solid as a rock. And these are the people who are great at their job, and they'll keep doing that job for years if you don't screw it up for them. And I realized that I had been sort of systematically undervaluing the people who were in rock star mode for my whole career and that that was not only bad management, it was sort of out of alignment with my personal humanity. So example, there's this guy we'll call him Derek who was.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so another mistake that people make all the time, especially here in Silicon Valley, is they look around at their team and they think that everybody has to be hyper ambitious all the time. And so there's this, especially when I was at Google, I had this sort of intense, you know, you've got to be on this super fast track. And then when I got to Apple, there was an executive there who said to me, you know, there's two different kinds of people who do really well on the team. And the key thing to building a high performing team is to balance the two. You've got a balance your superstars and your rock stars. Like, what the heck is the difference between a superstar and a rock star? So I'm sort of scratching my head. And she says, your superstars are the people who are responsible for growth.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we're all okay. We're all okay. Oh, sorry. It's Bob. I was never in a position to fire Eric Schmidt. So not that I would have fired Eric Schmidt. Anyway.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think another, yeah, Bob's. Bob's okay, by the way. Okay. Just like we all, it all, you know, in Silicon Valley, you fall up. You don't fall down. I know that one. Yeah.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was not for all kinds of candidates. You're not candid And then the other one, what other? Another thing went wrong. What other thing went wrong? They're not feedback. No, with other people. Bob is fired now.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe he would have stopped smoking pot if I had explained to him the impact it was. I mean, he could have fixed it. He had the capability. Maybe not, but at least he could.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I realized I had screwed up, and because I had screwed up, now I'm firing Bob because of it. And that's the worst thing about managing people is that you make your biggest mistakes on the backs of these people who work for you.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was so worried about hurting his feelings that I didn't tell him. And then the other problem, of course, was that everybody liked Bob, and I was afraid if I told Bob what a bad job he was doing, he would get upset, and the whole team would think I was a bitch, right? And I didn't want that to happen either. And so the meaning of radical candor is care personally challenged directly. And when you do both at the same time, that's good. That's radical candor. fail to challenge because you care so much, that's what I call ruinous empathy. So that was one mistake I was making with Bob. But then there's this other even worse mistake that you can make where you neither care nor challenge because you're worried about yourself usually. And that I call manipulative insincerity. So I would say those were my two screw-ups as a manager with Bob. And the worst part about this was that it was too late to say.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, it's a good question. But then he asked another question. I didn't have a good answer at the moment. I mean, I thought I didn't tell him because I wanted to be nice to him and not criticize him. And then now I'm firing him, not so nice after all, right? Then he asked me another question. And the other question is, why didn't anybody tell me? And I realized I was even the worst mistake. He says, I think I thought you all cared about me. You didn't tell me. And why didn't I tell him? I didn't tell him for a couple of reasons, neither of them that good. One is that”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And eventually the inevitable happens, and I realize if I don't firebob, I'm going to lose half my team, and we can't afford that. And so when I have the conversation with Bob, And explain to him how things stand. He pushes his chair back from the table, looks at me right in the eye, and he says, why didn't you tell me?”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was doing terrible work. Absolutely atrocious. I learned later the problem with Bob was that he was smoking pot in the bathroom six times a day. But I didn't know exactly explained all that. But I didn't know any of this at the time. And I was puzzled because Bob had this amazing resume. Like, why was he doing such bad work? And so, and I liked him. And so instead of giving him feedback when he screwed up, when he would hand something in that was incoherent, I would say, Bob, you're so awesome. You're so smart. This is a really great start, but why don't you try a little harder, come back? I'm sure it could be a little better. And this goes on for 10 months.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The trust ball is like such bullshit. Anyway, but you hate to admit that the trust ball is bullshit. What does that make you? So anyway, Bob was brave enough to do this. He was like, this is taking a long time. I've got a great idea. We're going to go around the table and we're going to tell each other what candy our parents use when potting training us. Weird but fast, right? Hershey kisses right here. We all remembered. And then for the next 10 months, yeah, if ever I'm grumpy, you know what to give me. And for the next 10 months, every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So I liked Bob. It was one problem with Bob.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's a good example of badness. So at JUCE, I had hired this guy. We'll call him Bob. And I liked Bob a lot. Bob was funny. He was smart. He was charming. He would do stuff like we were at one of those management off-sites where we're playing one of those stupid get-to-know-you games that everybody hates and nobody dares to admit that they hate.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad management. I mean, it was really pretty simple. In the first two cases, it was other people's bad management. And then I imagined from those two experiences that if I were the boss, if I were the CEO, human nature would change, which of course it didn't. And so those were where a lot of the early painful. Can you talk about something?”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the first failed startup was, well, probably the biggest one in my mind was Juice, the one I started. And before that, there was capital thinking, which was a commercial mortgage ASP, and before that, there was Delta III, which was voiceover, super early voiceover IP company.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of the reason why I wrote the book was that I screwed up so often in the failed startups as a manager, I sort of, when I first became a manager, a friend of mine was joking with me, she said, you started this company because you hate the man. And now you are the man. You hate the man. You are the man. It's even more complicated because you're a woman, you know. And I think a lot of managers have that feeling when they first become a boss of somebody. Like, what does that mean? And so those experiences in the startups and then seeing it done better at other places and not always better, but often better.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google is one of the biggest. Before Google, there were three failed startups, so Google worked out a lot better. I also started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow before Google and led a pediatric clinic in Kosovo. Those have failed startups or networks. Well, no, that's in addition to the three failed startups. Okay, you talked about a little bit about that.”
2017-04-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kim Malone Scott, author, ‘Radical Candor’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT