“Be Kind.”
Being kind is the most important value to me. Being kind starts with considering the immediate impact of what we do to the people immediately involved in any interaction we have. More wisely, it extends to the system we’re in, and therefore the nth impact beyond those immediately involved.
Kindness produces better outcomes in every dimension — happier people, better products, and superior business outcomes.
Being kind doesn’t mean not disagreeing, it doesn’t mean having to go slowly, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is right.
It takes sophistication, mindfulness, and practice to really grasp kindness. It’s a practice I work on and try to improve every day.
From my personal viewpoint, the document written by a Google engineer and making its rounds in the press advances a view that is antithetical to kindness. As many of my fellow leaders at Google have stated clearly, it’s harmful. I have already heard about negative impacts to people inside and outside our organization based on these pseudointellectual messages and their amplification in our minds and conversations. I’m upset about this. Exclusion is unkind; promoting thought systems built on exclusion is an attempt to systematize unkindness.
We are in the software business. We ship ideas. We can only generate our best ideas in a basis of psychological safety, and we do this best in a state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named “flow”. Our best collective ideas are produced in teams that reflect the world we operate in — and it’s a deeply diverse world. Diverse and inclusive teams ship better software that serves more people.
Kindness, inclusion, and diversity are all fundamentally linked. Let’s be awesome at all three.
