The False Dichotomies of the Googler’s Brand of Conservatism

Great points, Yonatan. Couple more thoughts:

1. Psychological safety is great, but not at the expense of culture. Culture is a core of a company’s strategic strength. A company would be silly and self-destructive to promote “psychological safety” at the expense of its own culture as this Googler is basically proposing.
2. Since when does Conservatism and diversity have to be mutually exclusive? You can be conservative and cooperative. You can be progressive and pragmatic. Drawing lines between these traits is a series of false dichotomies. The more important question is whether you want to invest yourself into creating something of exceptional quality that customers love?
3. Coming from a former Yahoo! employee, Yahoo! failed because it was too focused on “status” i.e. revenue growth and not enough on “empathy” i.e. customer experience and product quality. Google best not follow this person’s advice and “de-emphasize empathy”, what a disaster. Empathy is core to quality. Want to create crap products? Do what this guy says.
4. Equating preservation of “psychological safety” as equal to cultural and gender diversity sounds great, but it’s a red herring. I’d rather have a hugely diverse group of individuals who share a similar psychological framework and want to create awesome products with a laser-focus on customer experience than engage in some perverse form of political affirmative action and bring on a bunch of dudes that think diversity is a crock and would rather focus on “high status” stuff like revenue growth and sports cars. Call me crazy.