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I Was Rude, But I Was Rude to an Idiot: Fearless Respect, Leadership, and the Corporate World's Problem with Honesty
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $34.99
ISBN13: 9789948699927
Publisher: Naoum Barakat
Published: Jun 17 2026
Pages: 286
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A readable and highly detailed strategy to improve corporate leadership. - Kirkus Reviews
An energizing leadership guide - blends humanity with rigorous execution. - BookLife Reviews
A practical book for leaders who want to build cultures of honesty, trust and high standards. It offers a clear and compelling case that real respect means telling the truth, especially when it's hard. - Enrique Rubio, Founder and CEO of Hacking HR
Stop choosing between kindness and performance. Build a culture that delivers both.
Most leaders believe they must pick a side. Lean into culture, and you risk becoming WeWork. Lean into performance, and you become Uber. The data says you need both. The reality says most organizations achieve neither.
Over eighteen years in leadership and organisational strategy at companies like Mars, Lafarge, and Majid Al Futtaim, I saw the same pattern repeat itself. The systems designed to encourage openness, feedback, and culture were often the very things that were silencing people. I wrote the policies, ran the engagement surveys, and built the succession plans. Then I watched people become more careful, more hesitant, and less honest.
This book is my reckoning with that failure.
I Was Rude, But I Was Rude to an Idiot introduces Fearless Respect: the idea that leaders can care deeply about people while still demanding honesty, accountability, and high performance.
You will learn:
- Why some psychological safety initiatives make teams less honest, not more
- The difference between Necessary Friction and abuse, and why avoiding the first invites the second
- How the Performance-Culture Loop turns honest feedback into innovation and resilience
- Why the annual review has become a bureaucratic exercise, and what to replace it with
- The three non-negotiables of authentic leadership: vulnerability, humility, and consistency
- How frameworks like SBI and COIN turn vague criticism into clear, actionable feedback
- A practical 90-day action plan to move your team from hesitant agreement to honest dialogue
This book is for:
- CEOs who sense their culture has gone soft but do not know how to fix it
- Managers trapped between executive pressure and team sensitivity
- HR leaders who built the cages and want to tear them down
- Anyone who has sat in a meeting, felt the flaw, and stayed quiet
Drawing on real stories from boardrooms in Paris, Dubai, and everywhere in between, this book offers no theoretical fluff - just practical tools, uncomfortable truths, and a path to building an organization that is both antifragile and deeply human.
The silence ends here.
Click Add to Cart to start building a culture where respect and honesty are the same thing.
1 different editions
Also available
I Was Rude, But I Was Rude to an Idiot: Fearless Respect, Leadership, and the Corporate World's Problem with Honesty
Barakat, Naoum
Paperback
Also from
Barakat, Naoum
I Was Rude, But I Was Rude to an Idiot: Fearless Respect, Leadership, and the Corporate World's Problem with Honesty
Barakat, Naoum
Paperback
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