I’ll never forget my first meeting with the AdSense team in Tokyo. My plan was to hold regular meetings with them to ask for suggestions, concerns, improvements. My previous experience in such meetings in other countries had been that if I asked a question like, “What could I do or stop doing that would make your lives better?” and then counted to six in my head, somebody would say something. I counted to ten. Crickets. I asked a different way. Still, crickets. Finally, **I told them a story about Toyota that I’d learned in business school**. Wanting to combat the cultural taboos against criticizing management, **Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floor. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and they were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line.** --- **Tags** — [[quotes]] , [[teaching-anecdotes]] , [[continuous-improvement]]- [[kaizen]], [[feedback]], [[crucial-conversations]] **Source** — [[202303281533 - B - Radical Candor]]