Journal

There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate. All I can do is look up from the train at the windows in the buildings that might be hers. Every one of them could be her window, it sometimes seems to me, and at other times I think that none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.

Murakami’s short stories are like Raymond Carver’s, but with more magical realism.

Here are my ratings for each short story in the collection.

Honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed Radical Candor.

There are two main behaviors that make up ‘radical candor’: caring personally and challenging directly. The book is an overview of ways one can exhibit these behaviors to be a better manager (or honestly, human).

Below I will share some quotes an explain why they resonated with me.

On acting on feedback

Reward criticism to get more of it. Once you’ve asked your question and embraced the discomfort and understood the criticism, you have to follow up by showing that you really did welcome it. You have to reward the candor if you want to get more of it. If you agree with the criticism, make a change as soon as possible. If the necessary change will take time, do something visible to show you’re trying.

I agree that it is hugely important to act on feedback – and show progress towards change – quickly. If one doesn’t, people will not continue to offer feedback. Why bother? Similarly, retros without real change suffer the same fate.

On an obligation to dissent

In meetings, consider making an “obligation to dissent.” If everyone around the table agreed, that was a red flag. Somebody had to take up the dissenting voice.

This is a novel idea to me. It’s all too easy for everyone to agree by default in meetings. Encouraging people to role-play as a dissenter or devil’s advocate seems like it could be productive in certain situations.

On work-life balance

Don’t think of it as work-life balance, some kind of zero-sum game where anything you put into your work robs your life and anything you put into your life robs your work. Instead, think of it as work-life integration. If you need to get eight hours of sleep to stay centered, those hours are not something that you do for yourself at the expense of your work or your team.

I’ve seen way too many peers work crazy hours by choice (or working late at night or on weekends). Being singularly focused on work makes one a worse employee. It’s important to take care of one’s mental and physical health. For example, by running I’m able to think and solve problems more clearly. I chose this quote because I like the framing of work-life integration.

On feedback latency

Giving guidance as quickly and as informally as possible is an essential part of Radical Candor, but it takes discipline—both because of our natural inclination to delay/avoid confrontation and because our days are busy enough as it is. But this is one of those cases where the difference in terms of time spent and impact is huge. Delay at your peril!

I admit I’ve put off giving direct reports feedback. When I’ve done this I wanted to wait to perfect the message. But doing so makes it less effective. I need to remember to just do it.

When we organize our society around fake meritocracy, we erase the history of exploitation and the ways the game is rigged to prevent economic and social mobility.

A central premise of this book is that policing is “a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo”. This is argued with various historical examples of police action (Pennsylvania’s Coal and Iron Police, Texas Rangers, Chinese Exclusion Act, Red scare, Civil rights marches, Southern Strategy, etc.) that are scattered throughout.

This framing is used to set the scene for various problems with contemporary policing. The book take a high-level approach to introducing these issues, focusing on breadth over depth.

Some TL;DR quotes of various chapters that I valued the most:

• On policing in schools, “the overall approach of relying on armed police to deal with safety issues has led to a massive increase in arrests of students that fundamentally undermines the educational mission of schools, turning them into an extension of the larger carceral state and feeding what has come to be called the school-to-prison pipeline.”
• On the border patrol, the author argues “[w]e cannot and should not rely on ever more intensive, violent, and oppressive border policing to manage problems that we ourselves helped create.”
• On criminalizing homelessness:

Even if criminalization was successful, legal, and cost effective, it would still be unethical. We live in an economic and social environment in which the market is unable to house people at the bottom of the economic order and government is unwilling to make up the difference. Given this reality, how can we justify treating homelessness as a criminal justice issue? The law appears to be applied universally, but this fails to take into account the fact that the poor are always under greater pressure to break it and at greater risk of being subjected to legal action. As Anatole France pointed out in 1894, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.”

The book’s title appears more strongly opinionated than its contents. The book doesn’t call for dissolution of policing in those words, but does argue that for most of the problems that police are trying to solve, police are not the solution. Instead, health programs, jobs programs, better foreign policy, etc. all solve the root problems instead of the symptoms.

We need to invest in individuals and communities and transform some of the basic economic and political arrangements in our society. Chemical dependency, trauma, and mental health issues play a huge role in undermining the safety and stability of neighborhoods. People who are suffering need help, not coercive treatment regimes or self-help pabulum; they need access to real services from trained professionals using evidence-based treatments.

Overall, the book is a broad primer for current policing practices, their histories, and areas for improvement.

Clade is a weekend read about a near future where climate change has accelerated, bringing with it disaster as it worsens.

The book is short. Disproportionately it spans across three generations of family facing the increasingly bad environmental affects of climate change.

In trying to cover so much ground, the book fails to develop the characters, their motivations, and the full implications of the changing world around them.

The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time.

This book contains some nuggets of wisdom, surrounded by noise and some out-of-date topics. Overall, I think it is worth speed-reading, noting the valuable nuggets and then ruminating on those.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• When reading, it was sometimes abrupt jumping between sections that were written in the late 1987 edition and the 2013 revision. Talk of IBM and its glory could be followed by a reference to an iPod. This didn’t truly undercut the author’s points, but were definitely jarring.
• Lots of truisms that weren’t well backed up with non-anecdotal evidence – the author knows that x is better but doesn’t explain why. While I agree with a lot of them, it’s unclear how we got there and if I should really trust my gut (and this author).
• Even if I agree with the author’s premise, it’s unclear how to go about improving things. The author provides some recommendations on various problems/ways to improve teams, but they’re relatively light.

Overall I don’t regret reading it.

Quotes

On the purpose of a manager:

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

On hiring:

Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired. They test whether he or she is likely to be good at statistical analysis or programming or whatever it is that’s required in the position. You can buy aptitude tests in virtually any technical area, and they all tend to have fairly respectable track records at predicting how well the new hire will perform. But so what? A successful new hire might do those tasks for a few years and then move on to be team leader or a product manager or a project head. That person might end up doing the tasks that the test measured for two years and then do other things for twenty.