From “Praise in Public” to Radical Speed: Why Feedback Needs to be Instant
For decades, the “proper” way to deliver feedback was written in stone. The First Commandment of management was clear: “Praise in public, correct in private.”
Well... until recently.
Have you ever watched a basketball game? The intensity is high, the clock is ticking, and suddenly one team starts to fall apart. What happens next? If the coaches followed standard corporate feedback “theory,” the coach of the losing team would wait for a weekly 1:1 meeting to discuss the issue, right?
Of course not. The coach of the losing team nervously slams the buzzer for a timeout. The whole team gathers for 20 seconds to listen to a sharp, corrective speech. There is no sandwich method. There is no fluff. A player might even get benched immediately.
In the corporate world, we would call this “demotivating” or “unsafe.” But in sports, it makes perfect sense. Why the disconnect?
We have been taught that there are fundamental, unbreakable principles of management:
Keep the ratio of positive to corrective feedback at 4:1.
Never use the word “negative”—call it “developmental.”
Always give positive feedback in a forum, but keep corrective feedback behind closed doors to protect feelings.
Wait for the “right moment” (the so-called feedback curve).
That approach worked for a long time. It worked in a stable, slow-moving environment designed to respect our egos above our output. But in the meantime, the world accelerated exponentially. The margin between being the best and the mediocre became microscopic. Companies started looking for any edge they could find. Suddenly, we all ended up playing an intense, high-speed sport.
The change in the science of feedback resembles the shift from Newtonian physics to Quantum physics.
In this new reality, fast course correction, rapid adjustment, and “feedforward”—giving information that influences future behavior immediately—became critical success factors. The biggest companies in the world have realized this. It is a philosophy driven by Silicon Valley giants like Netflix and NVIDIA.
The Netflix Approach: Silence is Disloyal
At Netflix, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer describe a culture where withholding feedback is considered an act of disloyalty to the company. In their book No Rules Rules, they outline a culture of extreme candor. They argue that if you see something that could be better and you don’t say it immediately, you are letting your team down [1].
This requires a high degree of psychological safety. You have to trust that the person giving the feedback isn’t attacking you, but attacking the problem. When feedback is normalized as a daily operational habit rather than a frightening “event,” the fear dissipates.
The NVIDIA Way: The Value of Public Correction
Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, takes this a step further, challenging the old management adage of “praise in public, criticize in private.”
Jensen runs a famously flat organization and often delivers corrective feedback in the middle of meetings with dozens of people present. This sounds terrifying to the average manager, but Jensen argues that keeping criticism private deprives everyone else of the learning opportunity.
As discussed in recent analyses of NVIDIA’s management style, Jensen views feedback as a problem-solving mechanism [2]. If one person makes a mistake in logic or strategy, it is likely others are thinking the same way. By correcting it openly, he isn’t shaming the individual; he is synchronizing the collective brain of the company. It transforms a personal error into a scalable lesson for everyone.
The Framework: Radical Candor
How do we implement this without creating a toxic environment? We look to Kim Scott’s framework in Radical Candor.
Scott argues that high-performance cultures live in the upper-right quadrant: High Care combined with High Challenge [3].
If you challenge without caring, you are just being aggressive.
If you care without challenging, you are engaging in “Ruinous Empathy”—keeping people comfortable while they fail.
The basketball coach screams from the sideline because he cares about winning and he cares about the player’s development. Jensen Huang critiques the strategy in public because he cares about the company’s survival.
Conclusion
We need to stop viewing feedback as a “management tool” and start viewing it as a real-time guidance system.
Whether you are on the court, on a Netflix production set, or in an NVIDIA engineering review, the rule is the same: Transparency creates speed.
Don’t wait for the quarterly review. Call the timeout. Say what needs to be said. And then, get back in the game.
References
[1] Hastings, Reed, and Meyer, Erin. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Penguin Press, 2020. (Specifically the chapters regarding the “Keeper Test” and the culture of candor).
[2] Evaluation of Jensen Huang’s Management Style. See: The New Yorker profile “How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the AI Revolution” (2023) or various interviews where Huang discusses that “no task is beneath him” and that information must flow freely without hierarchy.
[3] Scott, Kim. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. St. Martin’s Press, 2017. (The foundational text on combining caring personally with challenging directly).