Scott Berkun

How to handle tough cricitism: an example

Awhile ago a wrote an essay on how to give and receive criticism. Writing about it is one thing, but doing is another. Recently I saw someone handle a tough situation in public quite well – here’s the story:.

Sun engineer Bryan Cantrill gave an offhand review, at a videotaped talk at google, of Rosenberg’s recent book, Dreaming in code (A book I reviewed last year). Rosenberg, instead of doing what many bloggers do, and either a) ignore the issue or b) escalate things into a juvenile flamewar, he looked carefully for the intent, instead of the sizzle, of Cantrill’s statements and offered a well reasoned response.

The result was an intelligent, respectful, and illuminating discussion than spanned across both blogs. Kudos!

Anyone know of other recent examples of maturity handling of criticism? This should awards for this kind of thing.

• Posted Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 10:19 am


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