The Culture of Feedback

...raising your hand is itself a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something....It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction. Not caring works surprisingly well....it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.

Clay Shirky (my bolding)

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/

The passage by Clay Shirky that I quote above hit me with the force of revelation, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It comes in the middle of a post in which Shirky urges women scientists and technologists to become more assertive for the sake of their own careers, but the point goes well beyond gender considerations. Shirky's insights help clarify my instinctive recoil from the culture of "feedback." Of course there is no getting through life without feedback, but we have given particular varieties of it an insidious and pernicious centrality. "Let me give you some feedback on that" usually really means, Let me tell you in a polite, business-accepted way what a loser you are; and, Let me also indicate sub-textually how completely awesome I am. Feedback as we commonly understand the phrase today is commentary that intends to assert a "veto power," as Shirky puts it, over the actions of anyone we disapprove. And I think that Shirky's suggested strategic response is the correct one: Try not caring. Do some people who could use a lesson not care about the opinions of others? Of course; we can all come up with examples. Can feedback sometimes be useful? Yes to that as well. But the culture of feedback deserves a spit in the eye, and I am glad to see that, for example, Samuel A. Culbert's and Lawrence Rout's book Get Rid of the Performance Review! has gained some currency in business circles. At my last corporate job, I was -- alas -- responsible for coordinating the annual performance review process; and it is difficult to conceive of a more worthless exercise.

http://www.amazon.com/Get-Rid-Performance-Review-Managing/dp/044655605X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278078971&sr=1-3