Kim Scott: The Power of Radical Respect and Candor

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Kim Scott. She is the author of a book called Radical how to work Together better. It offers a framework for creating collaborative cultures where everyone can do their best work. Kim is also the author of the bestseller Radical Be a kick ass boss without losing your humanity. She has a Bachelor's in Slavic Literature from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Scott coach executives at techcount companies such as Dropbox, Qualtrics and Twitter. She served on the faculty at Apple University and we almost overlapped there. She has also led the AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Her experience includes managing a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and starting a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. One of my questions to her is are you really a spook? Although I guess if you're a spook you're not going to exactly admit that in a podcast. Podcast. Anyway, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. I am thrilled to have the remarkable Kim Scott on the Remarkable People podcast. I saw that you started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. Walk me through that. Are you some kind of secret agent for Russia or something?

No, no. 100% no. My mother believes and there's nothing I can do to persuade her otherw that I work for the CIA, but I do not. In fact, I couldn't even get a job as a nanny in the US Embassy in Moscow because I was too liberal. So anyway, there you have it. I studied arms control in college and I graduated in 1990. So my senior year the Berlin Wall fell and all the problems I was studying to solve that seemed so intractable just kind of evaporated. And so I went to Moscow and I was doing a study on military conversion and swords into plowshares and I wound up working for a financial management company that was investing and all these converting Soviet defense plants and then the coup happened and they put their money in China But I wanted to stay in Russia. And so through a friend of a friend, I got a job working for this diamond cutting company called Lazar Kaplan and Kaplan.

That's a huge deal. They make radiant cuts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You may have bought one of their diamonds at some point.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, Yeah.

I used to be in the jewelry business.

Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. So you know Lazar Kaplan. Nobody else has ever known them. But you do.

Oh, no. Lazar Kaplan, the radiant cut, which is a combination of basically like an emerald cut, square cut, but a round cut in the middle, right?

Yeah.

It has more facets. Yeah.

More sparkle. Exactly. So the Soviet Union had been stockpiling its large diamonds for a rainy day.

And.

And they decided it was raining, so we cut them for them.

Wow, what a great story.

Yeah. And in fact, that was my first management. That was when I got interested in management because I had to hire these Russian diamond cutters. And I thought this was going to be easy. This was 1992, and the ruble was collapsing and the dollar was strong, and I had studied Russian literature. So what did I know about starting a business? Nothing. I was 22, but I thought, I have money and it's valuable, and hiring people is easy when you have money, that's all it's about. And so I went to talk to them, and they didn't just take the job. They wanted a picnic. And I was like, well, okay, I can do a picnic too. And so we went on this picnic, and by the time we were finished with a bottle of vodka, I realized that the thing they really wanted was more than money. They wanted to know they would have a boss who gave a damn, who would get them out of the country if it went sideways. And that was like, oh, maybe management is a human thing. And interesting.

So when is the Netflix series about your life going to come out?

As soon as. As soon as I can find someone who won't make a hash of it. It's funny, I go all over the place giving these radical candor talks. And in the radical candor framework, it's radical candor in the upper right hand quadrant, ruinous empathy in the upper. And everybody says they're ruinously empathetic. Except when I went to Hollywood, they were like, oh, we're a bunch of assholes here. We're all obnoxiously aggressive.

So you started this diamond cutting operation in Moscow, and then eventually you ended up working fast forwarding a few decades.

Yeah.

You started working at Apple University.

I did, yeah. I Did.

So here's a funny story for you.

Okay?

So I left Apple twice in 87 and 97. And then around, oh, I think 2000, I was at some conference, you know, the Kara Swisher Waltzberg conference. Yeah. And I saw Steve. And Steve says to me, I want you to come back to Apple and run Apple University.

You should have done it.

I know. I would be a billionaire today. And I told him, no, I don't think so, Steve. And so then he hired the guy who ran the Yale.

Yeah. School of Management. Yeah.

Could I have been your boss then?

Yes, you could have been my boss. That would have been awesome. I might still be at Apple today.

And then I would be in your book, you know, and I would say, okay, in. In this corner is obnoxious aggression. And the example of that is Guy Kawasaki.

No, never praise in public, criticize in private.

So I wish I could tell you that nobody ever asked me this question, but I'm going to ask you a question probably everybody asks you because of your Apple University time and your radical candor questions. So you know what question I have to ask?

Right? I'm ready.

What corner is Steve Jobs in?

You know what? So I think from the outside, most people would put them in obnoxious aggression. But I'm gonna.

I say, that's true.

Yes. I will say. And I did not ever work directly with Steve. I saw him from afar. But there are a couple of things that might indicate that he was radically candid. One is that as Tim Cook offered to give him part of his liver when he was ill and Steve refused the offer, and I don't know of a word to explain the offer or the refusal of the offer other than love. I mean, those two men truly cared deeply about each other. And so I think in his closest personal relationships, there was definitely radical candor. There was a lot of love. So I'm going to say that even though I probably would not have wanted to work directly for Steve, because I would have found it very intimidating, the people who did work directly with him, at least some of them had a radically candid relationship with him. Like, that's the thing about Radical Candidate. There's not an objective standard for it. It's interpersonal. And so, I mean, I'll give you a simpler example. So I had worked with this guy for a long time and I liked him a lot. We had a good relationship. He worked for me at a startup, and then he came and worked for me at Google, and there were a bunch of people on the team who didn't know me very well. And then he joined, and we were localizing adsense, and this guy, Jared is his name. He kept confusing Slovakia and Slovenia. And I corrected him once, I corrected him twice, and the third time I was like, it's Slovakia, not Slovenia, dumbass. But in the context of my relationship with him, that was radical candor, because that was fine. I knew it wasn't going to upset him. He knew I respected him and liked him. But from the perspective of everybody else in the room, that was obnoxious aggression. And so I realized, for the sake of the others, I needed to pause and back up and say, look, I'm not going to call the rest of y' all dumbass, but Jared likes it when I do, so there's, like, not an objective measure for it. I don't know. What do you think? You knew Steve much better than I did. Where are you going to?

I don't know if that's true, but I would definitely have to put him in the obnoxious aggression quadrant. But having said that, I think you have to consider another factor which is not that it makes it okay with someone like Steve. Obnoxious aggression is part of the shtick and made him effective, so more power to him. I cherish the days that I work for him. And it's kind of like if you played for Bobby Knight or Vince Lombardi to date myself. Like, people love those coaches who played for those coaches. So, anyway, this is my last historical question here. So I want to hear about your course at Apple called Managing at Apple, because, man, that sounds like an oxymoron to me. So what was that course about?

That course was about soliciting feedback. It was about building a great team, and it was about getting results. There was another class called Communicating at Apple, and it was ironic because I had managed a lot at Google. I'd manage AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. I left Google, I had 700 employees. I joined Apple, and I had zero employees.

And you got paid more?

Yeah, no, I got paid less. Actually, I took a pay cut, a 50% pay cut to go to Apple. I was that excited. As it turned out, the stock appreciated. So it was not a 50% pay cut, but I thought it was going to be a 50% pay cut. Anyway, at some point as I was designing this course, it was really interesting because if I had designed a course called Managing at Google, I would have designed it in about five hours and started teaching it. And at Apple, they gave me five months, and I Couldn't believe it. I was like, am I going to get fired? I'm not doing anything. It was a real education and how Apple gave people the space and time to really think deeply about things and to perfect ideas, whereas Google's just launch and iterate. So that was really fun. But then when I left Apple and decided to write Radical Candor, I had done a lot of the thinking for the class and I thought, oh, I've already done all the thinking. I can write this book in three months. It took me four years.

Why?

Because it turns out, like when you present something, you don't think as deeply as when you write it. And when I started writing it, I started arguing with myself. Is this right? Is this wrong? So the Radical Candor framework is care personally challenged directly. On the vertical line is care personally. Horizontal line is challenged directly. But at Apple, it was unclear to clear smiley face to frowny face. So the two by two wasn't quite right. It took me three months just to get the two by two right.

You should have hired McKinsey to help you.

I think I did better than McKinsey would have done. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was better that I did it. I worked, by the way, at McKinsey for two months. You did? I did. In between my two years of business school.

Wow. This is before. After you were a diamond mogul in Moss.

This is after the diamond cutting episode and before I joined the goal. Before I did three failed startups.

Kim, I gotta tell you, the more you describe your career, the more I am convinced you are a spook.

I mean, you and my mother can chat.

One of the people featured in our book is Julia Child. And I don't know if you knew this, but she worked for the OSS until her mid-30s. Yes.

Oh, my gosh. I did not know that.

Yeah.

Wow.

You have a future. And then. And then Julia Child moved to Paris where she fell in love with French cooking. Maybe that's the next stage of your life. You're going to be a chef.

No, no, no. My next. I wish I had my T shirt right here. My next phase of my life is going to be all about rewilding California landscape and growing poppies. That's what I want to do in my retirement. There you go.

Oh, so. Oh, man.

This.

This is going to be the most defocused episode in the history of remarkable people. But. So I live in Watsonville and I have a hill behind my house.

I will come and plant it. I will Come and teach. Turn it orange in the spring.

Holy. You gotta read. Think. Remarkable. There's a whole section about. So I had about 150 or 200 eucalyptus trees removed from this hill. Because for you, I don't want those things falling on my cars or turning my house.

Yeah, yeah.

So I had them all removed. And then I decided I gotta restore this to its native species, so I decided to plant oaks. And then I did this whole investigation of what it takes to plant oaks. And now, please don't correct me, because I don't want to have to redo my book. But what I concluded was, you go find acorns, you throw them in the water. The ones that float, you throw away. The ones that sink, you put in a tray, you cover it with a cloth, you put it in your refrigerator for two months, and then you plant it. And then some seedlings happen, and you protect those from the deer. And then you wait 20 years, and maybe if you're still alive, you can sit under the shade of the oak tree that 23.

That's true. I think that's an excellent plan. But what you can do in the meantime is plant some poppies while the oaks are growing. The poppies will not hurt the oaks. And then you can enjoy a nice orange hillside.

Oh, and then I can have this little side business of opium.

No, no, no. California poppies. You can't make opium out of them, unfortunately. But they're very beautiful.

I have a friend in Afghanistan who said he would send me seeds.

Yeah, yeah, Don't. Don't use the California native. They're adapted for the drought. Yeah.

Oh, man, I got to get you to my house to help me with my rewilding.

Rewild? Yes.

Oh, God.

Yeah. This is what a career in tech will do to you. You just want to get out and get dirt underneath your fingernails.

God, we've only been like 13 minutes into this episode, and now I know how to rewild my hill. And I know what I can do with my extra liver if I ever want to give it. Madison. Madison, if you ever need a liver, I'll give you my liver.

Okay? Not just. Not all of it, just half of it. Then you can share your liver.

It turns that's what co authors do for each other. They share rivers.

It is.

Oh, it is absolutely true.

Foreign.

Let's get to the topic of your book. So, first of all, for the ignorant among us, you just gotta tell me, what does respect mean in your vernacular?

So it's really interesting. There's two definitions of respect. One is something you have to earn. You have a skill. You need to demonstrate that you're good at the skill, and then people respect you for that skill. That is not what I'm talking about in radical respect. The other definition of respect is the regard that we owe. Maybe I should have called it radical regard, but anyway, the regard that we owe to everyone for who they are, what their emotions are, what their background is, that's what I'm talking about, is something that is every human being's birthright is that kind of respect. The respect that we owe one another, regardless of what we've done or haven't done in our lives.

And what makes radical respect radical, I.

Think it's because it's rare and it's fundamental. It's not because it's extreme. Radical we think of as extreme, but I think of it as like a foundational thing. And the reason why it's so foundational and so rare is because, you know me, I love a good two by two. It combines two different things. It combines a kind of environment where we optimize for collaboration, not coercion, and where we honor everyone's individuality rather than demanding conformity. So it's the kind of environment where the strength of the team is the individual and the strength of the individual is the team. You get the best of both worlds. And yet this rarely happens. And it's weird that it rarely happens, because I think we all intend to create these environments and optimize for collaboration. I've known a lot of different kind of leaders, and none of them really wanted to create a coercive environment. And certainly nobody wants to take a job at a place that's going to coerce them. We know that innovation thrives in freedom and collaboration. And I also have never met anyone who wants to work in a everybody's marching in lockstep 1984 style kind of environment. We expect our own individuality to be honored. And most of us think of people who honor other people's individuality. We don't want everybody to be exactly the same. And yet so often we fail on one dimension or another, and sometimes we fail on both. And then we wind up in what I call brutal incompetence. That's not what we're shooting for, but sometimes we land there.

Two things. First. So as I told you, I live in Watsonville, Santa Cruz. And I gotta tell you, there's a local mentality where respect is not at all defined like how you defined it. Respect is about, I gotta get Respect. And so if you look at me the wrong way, I'm gonna fight you. I'm gonna pull a gun on you. I'm gonna yell back, I want my respect. And it's like a. Not even passive aggressive. It's an aggressive, aggressive thing. I demand respect. How did we get to that point where I thought respect was a positive thing, but it's now like this. It's like this justification. I want respect. I'm going to storm the Capitol because I want respect. How did we get to this point?

I think a lot of people feel profoundly disrespected in the world in which we live. And I think part of the problem is actually the dramatic income inequality that exists in the world where the 1% are getting more and more. And I'm part of the problem, not part of the solution. But so many jobs that people have, they don't pay a living wage. You have to have two jobs. You should be able to just have one job to survive in this world. You shouldn't have to have two. You shouldn't be $400 from homelessness all the time. And so I think that's a big part of the problem. I think there are too many people whose lives are genuinely too precarious. I think that's part of the problem. But I also think part of the problem is, like, this idea that it's your own damn fault if you're in that situation, which kind of adds insult to injury. And so I think we really need to focus on improving that. Although I also think that there's core fundamental things that get in the way of respect, I think, are bias, prejudice, and bullying. Those are the root problems. And I think we often conflate those three things as though they're the same thing. So one of the things that I try to do, I'm not going to fix the whole economy in this book, but trying to address the things that we as individuals can address and fix. And I think very often we'll be in a situation and something will happen, and it'll kind of leave you gobsmacked. You don't know what to say. And I think part of the problem is that we have conflated bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they're the same thing. And if we break them apart, then it's easier to know what to say rather than saying, oh, this is this monolithic problem that we can never solve. Let's break the problem down. There's all kinds of big problems that we've solved as people. So I've tried to break it down. So I'm going to offer some simple definitions, but it looks like you want to say something.

No, I want. I was going to just say, please define the three things.

Okay, so bias I'm going to define as not meaning it. It's usually unconscious, whereas prejudice is meaning it. It's very consciously held belief, usually incorporating some kind of unfair and inaccurate stereotype. And bullying is. There's no belief conscious or unconscious. It's just being mean. And so if you think about those three things in a different way, it becomes easier to figure out what to say when you don't know what to say. So if it's bias, I recommend responding with an I statement. I don't think you meant that the way it sounded. Great example of this comes from a friend of mine who started a company, and she was going into a meeting with two colleagues who are men. And she sat at the center of the table because she had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal. And when the other folks came in, the first person sat across from the guy to her left. The next person sat across from the guy to his left. And then everybody else filed on down the table, leaving her dangling by herself. I think they assumed she was the assistant. And she started talking. That's often how bias shows up. So she started talking, and when the other side had questions, they would direct their questions at her two colleagues who were men happened once, happened twice, happened a third time. And finally one of her colleagues stood up and he said, I think Joanne and I should just switch seats. That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room. And he did that for sort of three basic reasons. The first was emotional. He liked her, and he didn't like seeing her get ignored. The second second was very practical. He wanted to win the deal, and he knew if they wouldn't listen to her, they wouldn't win the deal. And the third was around efficiency because he knew it was going to be easier for them to hear it from him than from her. Not because she couldn't speak up for herself, but it was just they were going to be more likely to understand what they had done if he pointed it out than if she had. So that's an example of an eye statement. It kind of holds up a mirror, but if you hold up a mirror to prejudice, the other person is going to grin in that mirror. It's not going to work. They're going to like what they see because they believe that thing. And so in the Case of prejudice, you need an IT statement. And an IT statement draws a line between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can't impose those beliefs on others. And an ITS statement can appeal to the law, an IT statement can appeal to an HR policy, or it can appeal to common sense. For example, a colleague of mine was in a hiring meeting, and everyone who had interviewed all the candidates agreed that the most qualified woman for the job, most qualified person for the job, was a black woman who had worn her hair out naturally. And when the hiring manager heard everybody's feedback, they said, oh, I'm not going to extend an offer to that candidate. And my colleague said, why not? And the hiring manager said, I'm not going to put that hair in front of the business. Unbelievable. So this was not long ago, and at a company everybody would recognize, how can my colleague employ an IT statement in that situation? It is illegal not to hire someone because of their hair, which it was in that state, thanks to the Crown Act. It is an HR violation not to hire someone because of their hair, which it was at that company. Or if she hadn't had the law or the HR policy on her side, she could have said, it is ridiculous not to hire the most qualified candidate because of their hair. So that's an example of an IT statement. However, if it's bullying, an IT statement is not going to work. Because a bully wants to kick past any boundary you set up, their natural instinct is to kick past it. And an I statement also won't work. Like an I statement brings somebody closer to you, and with a bully, you want to push them away. My daughter taught me about this when she was in third grade. She was getting bullied, and I recommended to her an I statement. I said, tell this kid I feel sad when you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She banged her fist on the table and she said, mom, they are trying to make me feel sad. Why would I tell them they succeeded? I was like, oh, that's a really good point. So in the case of bullying, you can't talk to me like that, or, what's going on for you here? Why are you doing this? Or if that feels too scary to say, you could just use a you non sequitur. Like, where'd you get that shirt? The point of that is you're now not accepting whatever it is this person is dishing out at you. You're in an active stance, not a submissive stance. So there's obviously tons more to do to deal with bias, prejudice and bullying. But those are just like. Especially when you're the. When you observe them, when you're the upstander. Those are some quick responses, and you may not even know what you're going to say. But just figuring out if you're going to start with the word I it or you can be really helpful to get the ball rolling.

Okay, so I'm going to tell you a story, and I'm going to.

You tell.

To ask you what I should do if this happens again.

All right? Okay. All right.

So now this story happened, I don't know, 25 years ago, but it was a formative occurrence in my life. So my wife and I and one son, we were living on Union street in San Francisco, right? Where Union street dead ends into the Presidio.

Right.

So it's like, you know, that's a hoity toity area.

Yeah, Right. Fancy.

Yeah. And so I'm out there and I'm trimming our hedge, and this older white woman comes up to me and says, do you do lawns, too? Okay, so now how do I know if that's bias or prejudice?

I think the thing that you do. But the thing I would do in that situation is I would start with an I statement. I would assume it's biased because that's easiest for people to. And so what I would say is, I own this home and I'm doing my own work, but I don't work for other people. And then she would be probably super embarrassed and hopefully she would apologize. However, if she doubled down and said, well, you could still come, then you know what it is, is prejudice. I'll share an example, a story from my career. I had just come back from maternity leave, and I was chit chatting with a guy before a meeting, and he said to me, my wife doesn't work because it's better for the children. And that, of course, in my current state, was like a gut punch. But I assumed it was biased. I didn't think he really meant it. And so I tried to make a joke that would point out to him what? And so I said, well, I decided to show up at work today because I wanted to neglect my children. And I was expecting him. Yeah. To laugh like you did and apologize and we would move on. But no, he doubled down and he was like, oh, no, Kim, I'm going to give you some research. It's really not good for your kid. And so now I know I need an IT statement. And so I said, look, it is an HR violation for you to tell me that I'M neglecting my children by showing up at work. And that had the desired impact. He stepped back and then I was like, look, I'm not going to make a thing of this with hr, but I think we can agree. So now I'm appealing to common sense. I think we can agree that it is my decision together with my spouse, how we raise our kids, and it's your decision together with yours, how you raise yours. And furthermore, I'm guessing you don't want to read my research any more than I want to read yours. So I think you could have said, it is your job to trim your hedges and it is my job to trim my hedges to the woman if she had doubled down. But I'm sorry that happened. It's infuriating.

If you want the rest of the story.

I do.

My father came and visited me about two weeks later. And I'm third generation Japanese American. He's second. He served in the U.S. army, you know, all that kind of stuff. His generation, they were trying to prove they were more American than Americans.

Right? Yeah.

And so I tell him this story and I fully expect him to absolutely go off on this situation. Right. Like, how dare this woman ask you if you're the yard man just because you're Japanese and you went to Stanford, you work for Apple, you've written books, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

And instead he says to me, japanese American guy cutting a hedge on Union street, most likely you were the yard man. So get over it.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. I'm sorry.

Ever since that day, it's taken a lot to offend me. I give people the benefit of the doubt and all that. But so anyway, now you mentioned something in your answer, which I have to ask, which is you said several times, I'm going to go to hr, I'm going to tell them, I'm not going to hire this person, woman with her hair or whatever. Right. But I think that we need to explore this concept of going to hr, because it seems to me that HR is not always the advocate of the employee. HR's job could be to protect the company from getting a lawsuit.

Yeah.

So they might try to talk you down or they might try to get you out of some kind of class action suit. So how do you know if you should go to hr?

Yeah, it's a really important question because I think hr, there's sort of an agency problem. HR has three different constituents that it represents. HR represents the company, and it's supposed to not let the company get fired. HR represents the managers Often HR is like a coach to the most senior leaders at a company and HR is supposed to represent the interest of the individual. And that's a pretty tough thing. In fact, it's maybe impossible to resolve. So I think that before you ever go to hr, you want to understand how HR operates at your company. I think there's a lot of cynicism out there and frankly, well earned cynicism about hr. But I think that some of my greatest mentors, like Shona Brown, who led business operations, which included HR at Google, is one of my great mentors in life. And, and so there are some wonderful people out there who can resolve this agency problem and who will do the right thing. But very often they won't do the right thing. If you read Susan Fowler's blog post about what happened at Uber, you'll see some horror stories about why HR was not doing the right thing at Uber. And it was interesting. I asked her later, I said, why did you keep going to hr? You knew that they weren't going to help. And she said it was really important. Part of building the record of what was going wrong was to prove. But that's a very different sort of mentality of going to HR than going to HR to really get them to help. I would also say about HR is that very often we over delegate to hr. And that was why in the case of it's an HR violation, I reassured this guy, I'm not going to go to hr, we're not going to get into this thing. But I want you to know where the boundaries are. So I think that in an ideal world, HR can make it very clear or the company can make policies that are very clear, but it's better if two people can work it out independently.

And so in 2024, if you are sexually harassed at work, there's two schools of thought. One is you go to HR or you like you sue or you do whatever. The other is you suck it up because they're going to ruin your career. So where are you on this today?

I think that the first thing you want to do if you get sexually harassed at work is you want to start to document what happened. Because even if you don't think you're going to file a lawsuit because it's so easy to feel gaslit in that situation. And when you document, you become more clear in your mind like what reality is. And, and it's also useful to form a contemporaneous record with your documentation. So send an email about what happened to a friend. You Trust and send it from a personal email on a personal device. So that's number one. Number two is you want to build solidarity. There's so much evidence that shows that when you have even one friend at work, one person you can really trust at work, you're happier at work. You do better work at work. And those friends can also help you dispel the gaslighting and figure out what to do. And then last but not least, I would say locate the exit nearest you, figure out what is the other job you could get, whose couch could you sleep on? Look at your savings. Can you not work for a while? Because the next things I'm going to suggest that you do involve a negotiated agreement. And before you go into any negotiation, you want to know what you're doing. Batna is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So I recommend always doing those three things. And sometimes you'll get bad advice, sometimes you'll get good advice. I one time was in a situation where wasn't exactly sexual assault, but my boss bought me the tightest pair of jeans I ever wore and told me my pants weren't tight enough. It was ridiculous. And so I went to two.

This wasn't at Apple.

I hope it was.

And no.

No way. Yes, no way. And my only alternative was to go to Tim Cook, which I was not gonna do. Like he had other things.

Wait, let me put my pieces of my brain back into my skull. You're telling me a top level manager at Apple told you that?

Yeah. And sent someone out to buy me these?

No freaking way. That's not possible.

It is. And it wasn't just the jeans. There was also like a shirt that if I wrote on the whiteboard would reveal my bra. It was ridiculous. And I think he really thought that he was doing me a favor because I'm not very fashionable and. And Google's like, everybody was just wearing Google T shirts and jeans. And Apple wasn't that way. I think he really thought he was doing me a favor, but I did not experience it that way. Anyway, I talked to two different mentors and one of them said sue, and the other said, don't blow up your career. And it's very interesting. I was telling this story later and I did not Sue. I wasn't gonna. Basically what I did was I did those three things. I documented what had happened and I talked to a mentor. Like it was Andy Grove who told me to sue Apple, by the way, which I do not take that advice. There you go.

Better and better. Okay.

Yeah, it's a good story. And it was somebody else who told me not to blow up by also famous, but prefers not to be quoted, who told me not to blow up my career. And I was telling this story later to Sarah Kunst, and I was advising the don't, you know, don't lock the boat. And because the person who said, don't blow up your career, that felt like the right advice. And Sarah Koontz, who had gone public with a sexual harassment claim, looked at me, and she said, look at me. Does it look like my career is blown up? I'm like, oh, no, it doesn't, actually. And she said, the problem with you saying that, Kim, is that people will listen to you. And I was like, oh, I always thought the problem was that people wouldn't listen to me. But I realized she was exactly right. So I'm not going to say sue or don't sue, but if you do those first three things, then I recommend taking a few more steps before you get to suing. One is talk directly to the person in charge, the person who did this thing to you if it feels like you're not going to get sexually assaulted again or harassed again. So if it feels safe. And in this case, it felt safe. So I went to the boss who bought me the tight jeans, and I told him a. I had quit, so it was super safe. And I explained to him exactly why. And he apologized. Like, I think he knew. He understood, and that was important to me because I was leaving people behind. And then the next thing you can do is you can consider going to hr. In this case, he was the head of hr, so I was killing two birds with one stone.

No, no, no, no, no. You're telling me the head of HR told you to buy tighter jeans and a tighter shirt?

He didn't just tell me. He sent someone out and bought them for me.

There is no freaking way you're making this shirt. No, I promise, there is no way.

Ridiculous things in every company every day. It's funny. When I was writing this book, Radical Respect, my husband was having responses like you. His jaw was on the floor. He's like, what? Now? You don't know, Andy, because you would never do this stuff, and this stuff would never happen to you, but it happens. That was one. It was so funny. When I started writing this book, Radical Respect, I thought, I've never really had. This is a sign of how deep in denial I was. Like, I've never really had anything terrible happened to me in my career, so I'm gonna have to Go and interview a lot of people. And then when I started writing, I was like, holy shit. I have a story for every day of my whole career. So sometimes it can be a little useful to just keep moving forward. But I think at a certain point, like, denial is like dragging a ball and chain around with you, so it's useful to acknowledge what's happening. Okay. But we hadn't got through all the steps about what to do. So talk to the person directly unless you feel like you're gonna get physically assaulted again. You can talk to HR if you feel like that makes sense. You can also tell your story publicly and you can hire a lawyer if you're so inclined. And for me, it was. It felt. It's interesting. You can tell me whether you think I did the right thing or the wrong thing or what you would have done in that case. I just. I didn't want to spend the time or the energy in a lawsuit. I just felt like a great soul sucking activity. And so I just got another job. And in fact, I got a better job and I moved on. And so that's privilege right there. But the interesting thing is, there, I talked to a couple of other women who did sue, and it was, in fact, really hard and really soul sucking. But I feel that those women, I feel like they took one for the team almost because we should be able to rely on our legal system to address these things. Like, this kind of stuff should matter to people. And I can laugh about it now, but I will tell you the truth. I did wear those tight jeans once, and they gave me a stomachache. I felt sick all day. And it has an impact. And then I never wore them again. I reverted to my preferred Levi's 501s that are baggy a little bit. But I no longer felt like I belonged. It was part of the reason why I left Apple was that experience, because I just didn't feel good after that. And so I can laugh it off now, but it actually wasn't funny at the time.

Wow.

Yeah, There you go.

We're just gonna have to drop the mic here for a while. Oh, my God.

I. And Apple's gotta tell you, Apple's a great company. Company. I love Apple. This will not happen to you if you take a job at Apple. I think everybody's learned their lesson.

Jesus. Holy cow. I think I'm speechless. And Madison will tell you I am never speechless, but okay. Up next on Remarkable People. What about you just put people's applications in and you let Chat GPT decide?

I Think that that chatgpt is not there yet. Google actually experimented with this quite a lot. It wasn't chatgpt, obviously, because it didn't exist then. But they were always trying to automate the decision making and it wasn't automatable. But what they did do that worked. They stripped personally identifiable information out of resumes. The people who were figuring out which resumes to move on to, to interview didn't know the person's identity. They didn't know their name. And that was hard. It was time consuming.

Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. At one level, I just want to ask you, and you also tell the story about how somebody came up to you, some male executive at some conference and asked you to find a safety pin to pin his shirt or something like that. How do men get to that position? What makes them so stupid and such assholes? What Trace for me the genealogy of that.

So I want to say men are not stupid and they're not assholes. I don't want to recreate the same. That would be a highly prejudicial statement. The vast majority of men I've worked with in my career have been fantastic. And one of the reasons I wrote Radical Respect is in homage to all the great upstanders in my career who helped me when I was in these bad situations. So why would this happen? Why would a guy assume that? And it was funny. Like at this conference, the conference organizers knew this was a risk because it was a conference for CEOs of tech companies, so it was very male dominated. But they had to their credit, like, been conscious about inviting as as many women CEOs as they could find and also inviting speakers who are women. So Condoleezza Rice was there, I was there. And a lot of the people who were working the conference were young women and they had given them these bright yellow T shirts so they were easily identifiable. And I was 30 years older and not wearing a yellow T shirt.

But were your jeans tight?

No, they were not. They were my preferred baggy Levi's. I now won't wear any other pants other than my Levi's 501s. As a result of that experience, we're.

Gonna sell a sponsorship for this episode.

Yeah, Levi's. Levi's. Thank you for your impregnable inseam and your nice fitting jeans. Anyway, so I was wearing my jeans, my. Or this orange sweater, which I Always wear. And I was much older, so I didn't look anything. But this guy assumed because all he could notice was my gender and his need. And so this guy probably had gone through his whole career surrounded by women who were there to fulfill his needs. And given the situation that he was in, I think that is what did it. There's a great book by Naomi Alderman called the Power, and it's a science fiction book. And in this book, there's some sort of chemical that gave women, but not men, the ability to shoot electricity from their fingertips. So now women are physically stronger than men, even though they're not bigger. And in this book, when women get this power, they start doing all these same kinds of things. And so I don't think the problem is men. I think the problem is power in a power imbalance. Go ahead.

But I want you to go further back. Did their parents raise these people to have these kind of beliefs? What happened that some of these men have this kind of attitude?

I think probably what happened was like, I want to honor all stay at home moms. I was raised by a mom who dedicated herself to raising me. But I think that if you're closest female role model was there always to serve you, and then you went into a career where, like, he was in tech, so he was surrounded by men almost all the time. There are very few instances where you have women at the very top of these tech companies and a series of assumptions get made. I'll give you another example. I was coaching a CEO, and he had no women on his team. And of his direct reports, CEO of big tech company. And to his credit, he assumed that the problem was their promotion process, not the women at the company, that nobody was getting promoted to that level. And so he hired me. He paid me to sit in on the promotion meeting and to note to see if I noticed anything going wrong. Because he said, look, we're all men. We probably won't notice. And there were two people up for promotion, a man and a woman. And they both had achieved incredible results. They were both sales leaders. They had both built great teams and loved them. They were both great leaders. And they referred to the man as a great leader. And then when they started talking about the woman, one person said, she's a real mother hen. And I was like, all right, back the drain up. And they're like, oh, Kim, we didn't mean it. It's no big deal. And I'm like, get real. Who are you gonna promote? The real leader or the real mother hen? Like, which and so I think a lot of this stuff, this is why you can't really over delegate to hr. A lot of this stuff is subtle and the law is not going to sort it out, and HR is not going to sort it out. We got to get together as human beings and sort this stuff out. Because one of the things I talk about in radical respect is like designing your management systems to be fair, to really promote, hire and promote the right people. Because if you don't consciously design your management systems that way, you're going to get systemic injustice. You just are. Because unconscious bias becomes unconscious discrimination unless you take steps like that CEO did to block it to prevent that from happening.

Okay, so what are these design paradigms to prevent this systemically?

Yeah, so I think there's two big things and then there's a million little things. But the two big things are make sure you have checks and balances in your management systems. Don't give any one person unilateral decision making over who gets hired, who gets fired. Create a process. This is one of the things I learned at Google. Shona Brown, who designed a lot of the management processes at Google, had a firm belief that for important decisions, teams make better decisions than individuals, especially decisions about who are we going to hire, who are we going to promote, who are we going to fire, how much are we going to pay? And so she systematically stripped unilateral decision making authority away from managers over those decisions. And at first when I got there, it was very frustrating. I was like, you hired me because I've been CEO of my own company and let me go, you know. But I learned actually that when I went with these processes that had been designed and they weren't super heavyweight, they didn't take a lot of extra time, but they did insist that I get input from other people, that we made better decisions. And so it was both better for the business, but it was also a little bit more fair. And I'm not saying that Google was some paragon of gender equality. It was not. But it was one of the best places I ever worked in that regard. So you want checks and balances, and you also want to measure what matters. You want to quantify your bias at every step of the employee life cycle. And when you identify bias, you want to figure out how to strip it out. So like, a simple example of that happening was in orchestras. In the 70s, orchestras were like 85, 90% men. And they decided that this was probably not because men were better musicians than women, but because there was something about the auditioning process. There's a famous story where they started putting a curtain up so you couldn't see. But it didn't change. And they figured out, but they didn't give up. They didn't say, oh, see, men just must be better musicians. They realized that what was happening is that women were wearing high heeled shoes. So people still, despite the curtain, people still knew when it was a woman or a man. So they made the musicians take their shoes off when they walked out. And now orchestras are 50, 50. And so you've got to do the work to really understand where is the bias creeping in? Why is the bias creeping in and how can we get it out? And the goal is to make better, better decisions.

I am not being hypothetical here, but what about you just put people's applications in and you let ChatGPT decide?

I think that ChatGPT is not there yet. Google actually experimented with this quite a lot. It wasn't chatgpt obviously, because it didn't exist then. But they were always trying to automate the decision making and it wasn't automatable. But what they did do that worked was first of all, they stripped personally identifiable information out of resumes. And so the people who were figuring out which resumes to move on to interview didn't know the person's identity, they didn't know their name. And that was hard, it was time consuming. But anyway, that helped. And then the other thing they did was there was just a skills test. And if you passed the skills test, then you went on to an interview with a person to see if you would work well. And they were very careful. Kahneman talks about this in thinking fast and slow. If you're going to interview people, be explicit about the things that you're interviewing for. And Google made a big mistake. I think one of the qualities that you were supposed to be interviewing for was googliness and so that was not very well defined. And that became like the same superhighway for people's biases. One of the things that I have recommended is that you and this you could use ChatGPT for, I think actually. But I recommended when I wrote the book because when I wrote it, ChatGPT was not at that level that it could do it, but I recommended hiring a grad student. But to read interview feedback, to read promotion feedback and identify biased language in the feedback and flag it textio, it's a great company, we'll do this for you actually. And you want to be careful about how you roll that out. But for example, Karen Snyder, who started Textio, wrote this article called the Abrasive Problem, and it turns out in performance reviews, and she analyzed hundreds of performance reviews. Men. Sure, he's aggressive, but he has to be to get the job done. Let's promote him. And then this woman who's exhibiting the same behavior, she's abrasive, and so let's not promote her. And so that kind of language can have a big impact on people's careers. And those are the kinds of things you want to address in your management systems to make sure that you're not skewing things in a way that's unreasonable.

Okay, now, it seems to me that. Not that I want to show my bias too much, but it seems to me that the current Republican Party and his lead candidates have set back radical respect about 50 years. I mean, what is a role model that's the antithesis of what you've described? So what happens now?

I think that in our culture, there's this notion that's very profound that bullying or even harassing or even physically violent behavior is a leadership attribute. And I'm just going to say it is not a leadership attribute. But we've got to undo this notion. And I think it actually begins in school. What do you get told if you get bullied in school? Ignore them. No. It is the responsibility of leadership to create consequences for bullying behavior. But leaders can't do it alone because very often the leader is the bully. It's also the responsibility of upstanders to intervene in that kind of behavior. So I think if we can learn to create and we can't just do it with one person, it's got to be a general thing. We got to learn how to create conversational consequences for bullying behavior to stop it in its tracks. We've got to learn how to create compensation consequences for bullying behavior. Atlassian, the software company, has a no brilliant jerks rule. And if you bully your peers, you cannot get a bonus, you cannot get a good rating there. And I think that is really important. And last but not least, there have to be career consequences for bullying behavior. And that means don't promote a bully. Too often they do get promoted. And when the jerks begin to win, that's when the culture of the company begins to lose. And so what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're giving feedback to people on your team who bully others. And if they can't stop it, you got to fire them. I think in the immortal words of Steve Jobs, it's better to have a hold than an asshole. Although I don't think that's quite how.

He meant that in this fictitious world that I'm about to craft. Okay, let's say, God, I wouldn't even know who would make the call or do it. But let's say that somebody empowers you to consult to today's Republican Party and says, oh, we have some problems here. Like Matt Gaetz is saying that the only women who care about abortion rights are the fat ones that look like thumbs and they're the least likely to get pregnant. And, you know, I think I, I would categorize that as bullying. What do you do when an entire organization seems to be infested like this?

Yeah, I think until you start to define what's acceptable behavior and what's not acceptable behavior and to create consequences for it, I think you would have to be willing to remove these people from their positions of power for behaving this way and that. I wouldn't take that job, I think, because I don't think that's going to happen. I think we are going to have to make this happen. Creating a better world is going to be a real barn raising, and I think we're going to have to demand it as a society.

But seriously, like Kim, it seems like roughly 49% of the registered voters in America, they hear a candidate saying, oh, I can go around and grab women by, you know what? Nothing happens. In fact, it, it has no sort of consequence on its electability. How do you even wrap your head around that? This is not like an outlier.

Yeah, it is not. That's why I said it's very profound in our society. And we got to take this seriously in our personal lives and in, in the situations that we're closest to, we, we got to deal with it. I will say that I think part of the reason the TLDR is, I don't know, it baffles me. But I grew up in Memphis and a lot of the people who taught me about how to be a good person are supporters of this guy who said it's grab them by the you know what? And that is upsetting and bewildering to me. But I will say at the same time, I think when Trump won the first time, I went back home and I was behind a car and there was a bumper sticker on the car, and the bumper sticker said, my kid beat your honor roll student's ass. And I feel like the sort of intellectual elitism that has pervaded the Democratic Party is part of the problem. To me, that bumper sticker was the best explanation I had for what was going on. And so that bumper sticker combined with what I'll call the 1% problem. And so I think we got to do better. Like, we need to be more respectful. We need to share our stuff, we need to share the money a little better than we're doing.

I can't say it was a similar discussion, but on a similar vein. I once interviewed someone who was the CEO, Fuller Seminary. And I asked him, so how do you explain evangelical Christians now? They're supporting Trump. They're supporting what seems to me just the opposite of what the Gospels of Jesus Christ are.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

And he said, you know, guy, when you encounter a person like that, do not ask them what they believe. Do not ask them why they believe it. You ask them how they came to believe that, because by asking them how, you might gain insight into what led them to thinking like that, and you might have greater understanding of what the problem is.

Yes, I think that's very. That is wise advice.

Now ask me if I've taken his advice.

Yeah. And I will say, I grew up, I had an enormous faith. And my faith was totally destroyed by my Bible teacher who was an evangelical. And my class was. Was about a third Jewish, and I was raised as a Christian Scientist, so I never got baptized. And this Bible teacher came in, I was in fifth grade, so we're 10, 11 year old kids. And she came in and she said, all of y' all who haven't been baptized are going to hell. And I was like, what? Like, where's the love? That made me question a lot of things, and I never did. I wish I could go back to her now and say, what were you thinking? How did you come to that conclusion?

Wow.

Yeah, we've ranged on a lot of stuff neither one of us were expecting to talk about.

I gotta tell I'm still suffering ptsd, but finding out someone at Apple at a high level to buy you tight jeans and a tight shirt, I just cannot even wrap my mind around that. I might have to switch to Windows and Android after today.

No, no, no, no, no. We love Apple. People join companies and they leave managers.

Okay, I love that. That's better a hole than an asshole. I'm gonna print bumper stickers like that so that women driving around, you're gonna see that. Unlock this car and say, I finally found something that explains what's happening here. Okay, listen, so I think we covered enough. My head is exploding. I'M getting a headache and, you know, I'm putting the brains back in my skull. But I would like you to just summarize. Radical Respect, like, in a. In a nutshell, what do people get from reading your book?

The thing that you will get from reading this book is you'll figure out how to build a culture and how to build a career that optimizes for collaboration and that honors your own and everyone else's individuality. And so you'll do the best work of your life and you'll build the best relationships of your career.

Wow.

There you go.

A small way to undersell your book.

Read this book.

I don't know about you, but I'm not entirely convinced that she doesn't work for the CIA. But put that aside, because if she does, she certainly has a great cover because she is clearly an expert in radical candor and radical respect. So I hope you learned about bias and prejudice and bullying and you fight those three things in this world because we need to get along better and collaborate and make life better for all of us. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Let me thank the Remarkable People team. First, there is Madison Knysner. She's the producer and co author of the book that you need to read. It's called Think Remarkable. Then there's Tessa Knysmer, who does the background research and transcript perfection for us. Also, there's Louise Magana, Fallon Yates, and Alexis Nishimura. Special thanks to Angela Duckworth. Angela Duckworth is the person who told me you should have Kim Scott on your podcast. And of course, Angela was right. You may start to recognize a pattern. When Angela Duckworth or Katie Milkman tell me to do something, whether it's for this podcast or my books, I just do it. Because Angela and Katie, they're always right. Until next time, be remarkable. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.