Kim Scott

Kim Scott, born Kim Malone, studied at Princeton University and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. Her early jobs were varied. She worked as a senior policy adviser at the Federal Communications Commission, managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo, started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow and co-founded a software start-up, Juice Software, as its chief executive.

At Google she led sales and operations teams for AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick. She then joined Apple University to develop and teach a leadership seminar. Later she coached the chief executives of Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter and other tech companies.

Radical Candor (2017) draws on these jobs. It argues that a good boss must care personally about each person and challenge them directly, both at once. Without care, feedback turns into obnoxious aggression. Without challenge, it turns into ruinous empathy. Some readers use the idea as permission to be blunt, a reading the book itself warns against. Her next book, Just Work (2021), on bias and harassment at work, was later retitled Radical Respect. She co-founded the company Radical Candor and lives in Silicon Valley.