Radical Candor Podcast

What separates a leader who makes wise calls under pressure from one who gets stuck in their own point of view? Caroline Webb has spent decades studying the answer — first as an economist and McKinsey partner, now as a leadership coach and bestselling author.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Caroline Webb about her latest book, Leadership Intelligence, and the science-backed system behind it: widening perspective to make wiser choices, lightening cognitive load so people can do their best thinking, and building the kind of team resilience that holds up under real stress.

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While the Radical Candor podcast team is on a Radical Sabbatical, Kim Scott is spending the season interviewing authors of the books that have shaped her thinking over the past two years. This week that's Angela Duckworth, the Wharton psychologist behind the #1 New York Times bestseller Grit, whose new book Situated argues that changing your environment is usually easier, and more effective, than trying to change your mind.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Angela Duckworth about her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. They unpack a deceptively simple three-box model that explains a surprising amount of human behavior, why willpower runs out faster than we think, and what separates a situation that helps you grow from one that quietly wears you down.

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In 1944, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services — the wartime precursor to the CIA — printed a field manual for ordinary citizens living under occupation, full of quiet ways to sabotage the enemy. One of its recommended tactics: run long, inefficient meetings. Eight decades later, that "sabotage" looks a lot like business as usual. Leaders spent under 10 hours a week in meetings back in the 1960s; today it's more than double that, and climbing since the pandemic.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Rebecca Hinds, author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. Rebecca has spent more than 15 years studying how work actually gets done — she founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and now leads the Work AI Institute at Glean — and she and Kim dig into why more meeting tools haven't made meetings any better, and what would.

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While the Radical Candor podcast team is on a summer break — the "Radical Sabbatical" — Kim Scott is talking with the authors of books that have shaped her thinking over the past couple of years.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Rob Lalka, Tulane professor and author of The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power, about why some tech founders start out corrupt and others get corrupted along the way — tracing the very different origin stories of Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the so-called "PayPal Mafia," and asking what it actually takes for a leader to resist the pull of unchecked power and money.

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Building high-performance teams is one of the hardest things a leader does — and it's easy for a passionate founder or senior leader to slide from advocate to authoritarian autocrat. Left unchecked, that shift quietly caps what an organization is capable of. So where's the balance between decisive leadership and command-and-control?

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Liz Wiseman, the New York Times bestselling author of Multipliers, The Multiplier Effect, and the Wall Street Journal bestsellers Rookie Smarts and Impact Players. Liz and Kim dig into why authoritarian leadership backfires, the handful of moments where a firmer hand is actually the right call, and practical ways to keep contributing even when your boss isn't a multiplier.

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While the podcast team is on a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is spending the season interviewing authors of the books that have shaped her thinking most in the last two years. This time, that's Dr. Becky Kennedy, the clinical psychologist and mom of three behind the parenting company Good Inside and the #1 New York Times bestseller by the same name.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Dr. Becky about the surprising overlap between raising a family and running a team. You can't send a direct report to their room, but the skills that make someone a good parent — holding a boundary while staying warm, getting curious instead of defensive, repairing a mistake instead of pretending it didn't happen — are the same skills that make someone a good boss.

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While the podcast team is on a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of books that have shaped her thinking over the past two years.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, about how zero-sum thinking drained America's public goods — and how a solidarity mindset can bring them back.

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While the Radical Candor podcast team is on a Radical Sabbatical, Kim Scott is sitting down with the authors of the books that have most shaped her thinking over the past two years. This week's guest is Oliver Bullough — a journalist from Wales who has spent his career chasing dirty money across the former Soviet Union, the City of London, and the world's quietest tax havens.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Oliver Bullough about how money laundering went from a niche service for tax-dodging celebrities into a global system that hides trillions of dollars for kleptocrats, cartels, and crooks. They trace the line from the post-war Bretton Woods order to today's world of shell companies, crypto, and AI — and what its unraveling means for democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.

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While the podcast team takes a Radical Sabbatical, Kim Scott is interviewing the authors of the books that have had a big impact on her over the past two years. In this episode she talks with historian Gary Gerstle—author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order and ten other books—about how the free market came to dominate American life, and what Kim calls her own unwitting role as “the Forrest Gump of neoliberalism.”

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Gary Gerstle about the two great political orders that have governed America over the last century—the New Deal order and the neoliberal order that replaced it—why it can feel like the U.S. has a one-party system when it comes to the economy, and what might rise from the wreckage of the 2008 financial crash.

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While the podcast team is taking a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of the books that have had a big impact on her over the past two years. In this episode, she's speaking with Steven Johnson — co-founder of NotebookLM and author of fourteen books on science, technology, and innovation — about his latest, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Steven Johnson about how three intertwined stories — the invention of dynamite, the rise of political anarchism, and the birth of modern detective work — reshaped the world at the turn of the 20th century. They start with Swiss watchmakers in the Jura Mountains, follow Peter Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid into the bottom-up ethos that built early Silicon Valley, and trace how dynamite handed small groups a disproportionate amount of force — and how the state's response built the modern surveillance apparatus. They end on a question worth sitting with: what would the 20th century have looked like if the anarchists had taken a page from Gandhi instead?

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