Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better and co-founder of Radical Candor, a company that helps people put the ideas in her books into practice. She is also the first featured Portrait from Google Labs, a new experiment that lets you interact conversationally with AI representations of trusted experts built in partnership with the experts themselves.
Chat with my Portrait
I want to talk with you!! Please come have a chat with my experimental Portrait here. A conversation with my Portrait can answer questions you have about Radical Candor or Radical Respect, help you practice a conversation so that a chat you dread can become one you look forward to, or just help you get more done with less drama.
Obviously, this is not the same thing as the two of us sitting down and having a conversation, but the Portrait has infinite availability, unlike me :) It’s still an experiment, so try it out and be radically candid with your praise and especially your criticism!! That will help make it better.
Every once in a while, you get to work on something really cool with a group of people you love working with, and this collaboration between the Google Labs and the Radical Candor teams is one of those peak experiences for me. There is enormous debate about the risks and benefits of AI technology, so I want to explain why we did this.
One of the great joys in my work is the conversations I’ve had with people about Radical Candor and Radical Respect. In fact, one of the best moments of my whole career was a conversation I had with a perfect stranger. This person had been promoted to manager for the first time and, like so many others, found it a bewildering, lonely experience. “Then I read your book,” they told me. “And I felt like I had company.”
As so often happens, one of my greatest joys is deeply connected with one of my greatest sorrows. It happens a few times a week that someone will want to get my advice about a conversation they need to have but dread, or a situation at work that feels unfair but impossible to deal with, and I have to say I don’t have time to talk. Or I miss the email or the note on LinkedIn altogether.
I so deeply want to have all these conversations. But like all of us, I am a human being. I only have so many hours in the day. If I had all those conversations, I would neglect my family, my friends, my work, or all three.
In fact, the reason I wrote Radical Candor was because I knew that if I coached too many people at the same time, I’d neglect everyone. So I thought, I’ll just write a book with all my thoughts and share them with everyone. I don’t scale, but a book does!
And a book does scale. A writer writes it once, and then a hundred or a thousand or a million people can read it with no additional time from the writer for each new reader. Then, if a lot of people read the book something really cool happens. People want to talk about the book!
Now the author is back to the limitations of being human. No matter how much the author loves the book and all its readers, the author can’t talk with everyone. So on the one hand, writing solves a scaling problem. And on the other hand, writing creates a whole new scaling problem.
The Radical Candor team, the Google Labs team, and I have worked together to find a solution: a Portrait of me that you can talk to 24x7, for as long as you want. Of course, I won’t be the only Portrait, there will be many thousands of them. But I am really proud to be the first one.
My own son tried it out, and had an hour-long argument with it about some rules I have that he didn’t agree with. I was really proud of the advice the Portrait gave him–I couldn’t have said it better myself. And he reported that talking to the Portrait was more fun than talking to me! (That’s what it’s like living in the house of Radical Candor :)
Cheers,
Kim
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