Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Radical Canter podcast. I'm Kim Scott. I'm Jason Rosoff.

And I'm Amy Sandler. This past summer, our content intern Katie Bartlett. Hi, Katie. Hi, Katie. We miss you.

Katie wrote a piece about the workplace culture trend toward niceness,

investigating whether or not prioritizing, quote, nice feedback that's full of vague platitudes

over specific and sincere feedback that could make people uncomfortable is, in fact, harmful.

Kim, in radical candor, you wrote, quote,

when bosses are too invested in everyone getting along, they also fail to encourage the people on

their team to criticize one another for fear of sewing discord. They create the kind of work

environment where being nice is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance, end quote.

So Kim, you called this ruinous empathy.

Yes.

Somebody recently, sorry to interrupt, but I can't help myself because it's so relevant.

Somebody reached out to me and said, they called this false harmony.

And I think that's a good, much though I love ruinous empathy.

I think false harmony is another good way to describe this.

It's, dare I say, it strikes just the right note.

Yes.

Ah. It's, dare I say, it strikes just the right note. Yes. So whether we call it ruinous empathy, false harmony.

But what we call it aside, I mean, Kim, when you wrote radical candor at this point now,

how long ago, if we're in

2023, what year did you actually start writing the rough draft, would you say?

I started writing it probably in 2012.

...