Steve Jobs had a particular philosophy around giving tough feedback.

https://www.littlealmanack.com/p/biggest-lesson-steve-jobs - "Are you avoiding giving feedback because it's easier for you to just be nice?"

It's easy for a powerful person to say that.

In a bottom-up environment, where you have to work with peers and get them to want to work with you, you have two choices:

1) be nice to people and have them like working with you, or

2) do the Legolas sprinting up the falling rocks thing where you go balls to the wall never stopping because stopping is death.

Just steamroll everything and everyone and never stop because you'll leave a trail of frustrated (or dead!) bodies behind you who will not want you to succeed.

The approach I took, uniformly, was the first. I couldn't bring myself to do the latter!

But people who are very successful in these kinds of environments often do the second.

The second is a kind of cheat code, a corrupting force.