Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction (Amazon) was as brief as the subtitle promised. A friend recommended it as a good primer, and as my understanding of Agile comes from university and osmosis, I bought the book and gave it a read.
I appreciated how succinct it was, and feel like I have a good grasp on what Scrum is (and isn’t) now. It felt expensive for a ±20 minute read, but perhaps I was paying for the time I didn’t spend reading extra unnecessary verbosity.
I loved my friend Camille‘s book The Manager’s Path (Amazon). When I became a manger, I assembled myself a little course – some books, blogs, newsletters, and made my way through them. I wish I’d had this book to start off with – it’s the overview I needed, but never found until now. I plan to buy it for every newer manager I know. Even for more experienced managers who have already learned some of the lessons in there (1:1s! So important) there’s still more. I particularly appreciated the sections on project planning, managing managers, and strategic leadership.
I really recommend this book for all engineering managers and tech leads and really encourage everyone else to read it too!
You might also like the podcast Camille and I recorded.
Someone replied to a Where the Hell is Cate letter recommending I read Devotion (Amazon). Some of it seemed like trite nothings, and the “my love” irritated me. But some pieces of it seemed like profound ideas to meditate on. About love, and acts of love, being present, and showing up doing the work. It’s a short book, but most of all a peaceful book. I needed a peaceful book right now. I think a lot of us do.
I read Leadership and Self Deception (Amazon) years ago, several times. It was a book that profoundly changed the way that I think about things, the way that I approach the world. When some conflict arose at work, I saw how the ideas in the book would help, and tried to get everyone on my team to read it.
This wasn’t entirely successful. Eventually I bought it on Kindle (my physical copy had been a casualty of some international move) and re-read it again myself, so that I could better talk about the ideas in the book to people.
The main premise of the book is that there is a way of being, “in the box”, where you are just seeing people as they interact with you, and not how they are. Something I wrote after reading it originally,
Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box (Amazon) is another book on leadership – one that I found completely changed the way I look at everything. It’s funny, because in a talk based on that one of my friends was irritated because it seemed like we were being given life advice – but having read the book, it’s true that it is life advice – because (I think) this view of leadership is all about being a nice, humble, respectful, and – crucially – taking ownership of the mistakes you make instead of assigning blame.
This book shows us a world in which we are all, inside our boxes, desperately trying to justify the actions we take that are less than honorable, less than kind. If you don’t want to be such a person, you can choose to live outside your box. You can see others as humans – with their own motivations, fears, and justifications, rather than as obnoxious objects trying to take you down.
It was really interesting to return to the ideas that I had internalized as part of my value system, and reflect on how I had lived up to them – and how I hadn’t. It was also interesting to reflect on these things now that I’m at a different point in my career. When I first read it, I was an intern. Now I’m a manager. I want my team to be “out of the box” to each other (and to me!) – I think it’s a pre-requisite for a blameless culture – but how do I create an environment that enables that?
(Especially if they don’t read the book.)
We did a discussion around the ideas in it, and it was so helpful – to build that shared language together. I think the most helpful idea in it to discuss as a team, is how conflict can escalate. When two people are looking to justify, neither of them are really listening to each other, and hilarity (not really hilarity) ensues.
Entertainingly – I steered away from life examples (deliberately) and focused on work examples (code review is a good one!) and afterwards someone observed that it was applicable outside of a work context.
I’m really glad that I took the time to re-read it, it’s re-enforced my conviction that it’s one of the most helpful books on leadership I’ve ever read. I really recommend it.
One Strategy (Amazon) is about building the organisation that built Windows 7. It’s a long book that covers a bunch of things. Most notably:
Strategic alignment – how do you get a large organization all on the same page? (Everything else is really a sub-part of this).
Planning, middle out. Leadership sets direction, but not details. Everyone is involved.
Making hard choices – what goes in, what gets left out. You can’t make everyone happy and in part as a result of this criticism of the paths not taken is disproportionate.
Communication. Much of the book is internal blog posts from that period.
My favourite thing about this book was the intwining of theory and the blog posts from the period. Fascinating – so many business books are all theory, or micro-case-studies. I loved the combination with what it looks like in practise, and the change over time.
The book inspired me to think about how I want my team aligned, but most of all, how can I be transparent in communicating that?
Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help them Stay (Amazon) is an eye opening book. It was written a while ago, about corporate America, but it is very much applicable to the tech industry today and the poor representation of certain groups of people. If I have had reservations about the process being taken, this book confirmed those reservations – and more. I can’t believe people presiding over things have read this book (because I have to think if they had they would have changed their behaviour), and they should have. There’s also a great checklist of questions to help evaluate environment, which is useful for anyone who is job hunting.
It took me a long time to get to reading this book because I thought I wasn’t ready yet – I found it and bought it shortly after I left, when I was just starting to crawl out of burnout, or perhaps just accepting that I was. I didn’t really want to understand how common and predictable it was yet. I definitely found some of the later chapters hard-going emotionally as a result. But I’m so glad I did read it, and if you have anything to do with creating an inclusive environment at work (so – if you have a job), then I recommend reading it.
Favourite quotes:
Some things I wasn’t as keen on:
High Output Managemen
t (Amazon) is a really great, interesting and helpful. It’s a little dated, being written in 1983, and I don’t think it was really updated for the 2015 re-release.
What I found most useful were the sections about meetings and decision making. What does a good 1:1 look like? How long should it last? The answer he gives is 1 hour, which seems long, but when I sat with that for a while it makes sense and I plan to try it with my team.
For decision making, he talks about how meetings should be run, who should be in them, and the idea that the meeting owner is not necessarily the most senior person.
Another really helpful concept is “nudges”, which I internalised as asking the right questions about important topics. The section on performance reviews was also helpful, and gave me a lot of things to think about.
He uses “he” throughout, which is jarring (I read so few books that do this lately), but many of the stories about actual people were about women. I’d sooner have that than how it was in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, where Horowitz uses “she” throughout but other than his wife only talks about men. Of course best is Hot Seat because Dan uses “she” throughout and tells stories about women.
Towards the end of the book I started to appreciate it as it explains various processes at Google (and other SV tech companies), which took Intel as a model. There are certain things that I came to understand the theory of, even though they were badly applied. For example the distain for external training. When it comes to training people on processes within a company (e.g. career development), it makes sense. When it comes to general things like public speaking or “unconscious bias”… well maybe not so much. There were other things about interviewing, and that being a bit more combative, that I feel like it explained the root of. The way of interviewing started with blunt… and has in places progressed to mean.
All in all I got a lot out of reading it, and definitely recommend it. If you’re a manager, it’s an excellent resource and starting point, if you’re trying to understand the system in which you operate, it’s also helpful.
I really, really enjoyed The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (Amazon). So much so that I read the whole thing in a day (something I regularly do with novels, but not so regularly with non-fiction).
It’s compelling because it’s about difficult answers to shitty situations. Because it’s so honest. This is a man who succeeded beyond what most of us even dream of, and he’s open about the personal and physical cost to him along the way.
I’m not particularly enamoured of the VC model, my aspirations are around freedom and building things that are cool or useful (ideally, both), not around running a Fortune 500 company. But I still found this book so interesting, and so insightful. Highly recommend. Read it. Meanwhile, I’ll read it again.
I can’t say I enjoyed A Year In High Heels by Camilla Morton (Amazon), in part because I never quite figured out what it was supposed to do – inspire to live a more fashionable, glamorous, cultural life? It was too shallow and wide-ranging, saying not very much about a wide variety of things. The only thing I really liked, is that for each month there was a “muse” – women who had had a meaningful or interesting life in some way. Peggy Guggenheim was a favourite, I must go to Venice and see her museum.
Perhaps the book is just out of date – it felt more like I was reading a year’s worth of blog content, than a book. I would say, don’t bother, unless (maybe) you live in London and are looking for a fix of cultural recommendations – although I’m sure there are other (more up to date!) sources.