This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.

Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Kindness Makes Communication Work Better

Niceness is pragmatism.

Tech-culture podcast Exponent came back from its summer hiatus on the 6th. In the most recent episode, hosts Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed Amazon’s work culture in reaction to that now-infamous New York Times article. Their conversation touched on the necessity of soft skills even in creative environments where solid ideas take precedence over everything else.

Successful companies set high standards and enforce them. They must! There is no other way to ensure excellence. Trade-offs are inherent to this arrangement — you can’t care profoundly about your professional results, work devastatingly hard to build something amazing, and still spend plenty of quality time with your wife and kids. The laws of physics forbid it — you can only be in one place at a time. If you’re at the office, then you’re not tossing a frisbee around in the backyard.

office drone lyfe
Illustration by Yue Wu.

More crucially, competitive companies develop and cherish workplace cultures that demand people to identify and demolish subpar ideas. When you prop up bad suggestions to make their progenitors feel good, you guarantee a future of low-quality initiatives. Next stop, loss of market share! It makes sense that brilliant executives want to stamp out the impulse to be nice. Except wait, no, it only makes sense superficially.

Allworth called this attitude “the primacy of ideas”. He pointed out that brutal honesty about the merit of any proposition favors “thinkers” over “feelers”. We INTJs and the like are able to maintain some emotional distance, to take a step back and rationally examine feedback. (Which doesn’t mean we aren’t hurt by criticism — Thompson added that this type of person also views their work as their source of human value. If the output is deemed inferior, we judge ourselves very harshly.)

Allworth explained that a workplace culture hostile to people who prioritize relationships will end up being a monoculture, alienating the voices of potentially useful employees and limiting diversity of thought. Well… yeah. It will.

be well at work :)
Illustration by RSO.

I’m probably reacting emotionally (ha) and not being fair to either Thompson or Allworth, but it was frustrating to listen while they grudgingly came to the conclusion that there’s value in being nice. I can’t help but think that only men would hash this out at length before tentatively agreeing that maintaining relationships is important. I even felt bitter while listening. It seemed like a classic example of “feminine” strengths being devalued, left invisible by default. Of course, the conversation’s outcome was better than if they had decided soft skills weren’t worth anything at all — but did it really need to be debated?

I’m an intellect-first, analytical kind of person. I’m also a woman, socialized to be nice and put up with a lot of nonsense from other people. Maybe the combination of those contradictory tendencies makes it easy to realize that you need to present information in a way that people find acceptable. Intellectual merit isn’t everything — in fact, it isn’t anything without soft skills. Smart people who can’t work with other people aren’t going to get anything done. (To be clear, this is something the Exponent hosts mentioned and agreed on.)

illustration of a good idea taking off
Illustration by Senya Pixelev.

Of course, I went through the same personal-growth phase that Allworth and Thompson also discussed, aggressively wanting to be right and constantly believing that I knew best, before I realized that a good idea you can’t get anyone to buy into has the same results as a bad idea. That’s really my whole point here:

A good idea that you can’t persuade people to believe in is functionally the same as a bad idea.

Even famously brutal tech founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos had to figure out people-friendly ways to present their plans. We know this happened in part because otherwise Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon wouldn’t be iconic companies.

Luckily, collaborators can give each other straightforward feedback without being cruel. Thompson and Allworth do it on the podcast all the time! (More on this in an upcoming review of Ask a Manager blogger Alison Green’s book Managing to Save the World.) I think that’s why I was so frustrated — the necessity of niceness, or at least courtesy, seems utterly obvious, even if only based on their own dynamic. I don’t think the topic shouldn’t have been mentioned — here I am mentioning it at length — but I wonder why the conclusion surprised them.

Pretty Stereotypes Of City Women

Excessive lyricism lies ahead. Sometimes I can’t resist over-writing.


I love cities, but I don’t want to live in one. Every time I visit San Francisco it smells more like piss, you know? For me, home is a mid-size town, a suburb on a hill. But of course I’m grateful to be able to access urban cultural nodes, to watch live theater and buy pricey drinks, to browse bookstores and pretend the panhandlers aren’t talking to me. Momentary immersion is exciting. High-profile cities are glamorous despite all the grime — the word “cosmopolitan” accrued its connotations honestly.

girl fixing her motorcycle
Photo by Mike Babiarz: “My downstairs neighbor Marni doing some maintenance on her Yamaha XS650.”

City women are easy for me to idolize. Do people find the opposite of their own attributes attractive, or is that just me? I’m drawn to sophistication, to convincingly affected indifference. What’s more enchanting than the ability to stroll past mounds of trash without paying attention?

city woman walking past garbage in NYC
Photo of NYC’s Greenwich Village by Ryan Vaarsi: “There is not, despite appearances, a garbage strike underway at the moment.”

I’m not a city woman. I could never be a city woman. I care too much about how I’m perceived, and the temperament for regular cocktail parties has never been my strong suit.

Yes, realistically, my two-dimensional idea of a city woman doesn’t exist, but let’s roll with it.

Nicole Kidman as Marisa Coulter in the movie version of The Golden Compass.
Nicole Kidman as Marisa Coulter in the movie version of The Golden Compass.

I think of Mrs Coulter from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Vaguely evil under the tight dress and well-cut wool coat. (In Mrs Coulter’s case, extremely evil.) A tool of power who nevertheless wields it, a woman among men who relishes her feminine influence because the alternative is recognizing their masculine advantage.

I realized while writing this that all of my notions about femininity are particular facets of an inferiority complex dressed up by certain aesthetics. The observation is not new. Besides, I have the same reaction to, like, indie music. I’m such a born hipster but I feel mad defensive about it. (A reaction that became classically hipster immediately after the phenomenon achieved meme status.)

I want to be aloof and reserved and brash and sassy and especially never self-conscious. I want to have Marie Antoinette’s cake and eat it too. Okay, fine, I want to be Blair from Gossip Girl, even though she’s excruciatingly self-conscious.

I am continually trying to parse femininity, to practice ladyhood, and stumbling on contradictions. Being human is weird. (QED.)

cosmopolitan fashion collage
Collage by Joana Coccarelli.
graffiti woman, red lipstick
Photo by Sarah Murray.

Sign up for my newsletter to stay abreast of my new writing and projects.

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program. If you click on an Amazon link from this site and subsequently buy something, I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you).