Accidentally in Code

Tag: books

  • Books about Therapy

    Books about Therapy

    Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) was one of the most impactful books I read in 2019. It was extremely readable and super insightful. Reading this book fundamentally changed my approach to therapy, helped me accelerate my progress, and ultimately finish* (*at least for now) therapy.

    Therapy is such a personal thing and it’s hard to know what happens behind the scenes, what is a normal struggle, what the process looks like. This book was the only thing I’ve read that gave me any insight into that. It’s also easy to unintentionally get in your own way, and the author is so open and honest about how she gets in her own way, that it helped me see how I was getting in my own way and stop – or at least get in my own way less. I’ve bought this book for multiple people, and recommend it whole heartedly.

    This Too Shall Pass (Amazon) is not as well written, honestly I would not describe it as well written at all. It was recommended to me by a friend who is a trainee therapist. It’s a series of case studies, each of them highlighting particular points of struggle and phases of life. The case studies are arranged into themes, and each theme concludes with some general insight.

    I still found it worth reading, there is this genuine empathy, care, and understanding of every person depicted and I really appreciated their stories and the insight into their struggles. I read it at a point where I was struggling with the enforced life changes of the pandemic, and wondering whether I should reach out to my therapist, but feeling unenthused about therapy via Zoom. The book helped me step back a bit, normalized some of the things that I was struggling with, and encouraged me to have a bit more empathy for myself and ultimately feel better without needing to return to therapy. Something I really appreciated about it was that it’s by a British therapist who practices in London, which is more culturally akin than one based in LA/USA.

    Bonus book, not strictly about therapy, but Burnout (Amazon) was hugely influential on me and fundamentally changed the way I think about success and wellbeing. I have bought well in excess of twenty copies for other women, and think every professional woman should read it. It was so well written, so readable, and such a great articulation of forms and effects of stress resulting from unrealistic and unreasonable expectations on women. I tweeted snippets and insights as I read it, which you can find in this thread.

  • Book: Living by the Code

    I’m in this book Living By the Code, talking about engineering management. Ray helpfully pulled out some of his highlights from my interview:

    1) Keeping a team productive
    I loved the section where you talked about orienting the entire team toward continuously delivering use value. It sounds so simple when you say it, but it’s so easy to lose sight of this in the day-to-day!

    2) On building trust
    The section where you talked about being a decent person and showing up to build trust also resonated with me. God knows how many mistakes I’ve made over the years, but I think generally trying to treat people right is what gets me through it. :] It also reminded me of something I read recently in Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, about how building trust is like filling a jar with marbles, one marble at a time. 

    3) Weekly notes
    I also really like how you write up weekly notes so your team is aware of what you’re focusing on, and using that as an opportunity to reflect and plan for most impact. I want to try this myself sometime. 

    I have a couple of books for friends and family, but Ray also kindly gave some extras for people from under-indexed groups. If you fall under either of these categories, I’d love to send you a copy! Either DM me on Twitter or email me and I’ll send you a copy.

  • Book: Managing Transitions

    Book: Managing Transitions

    I’ve been thinking a lot about change management, lately – what makes it work, what makes it not. As a result, I was looking for reading that would help me formalize some of the concepts, to allow me to go one level deeper than recognizing what won’t work to more thoughtfully critique why certain things are ineffective, understand what appeals about them, what would be better instead. As part of this, I read Managing Transitions (Amazon) which was fascinating and really helpful. I’ve included some of my favourite quotes below (emphasis my own), but I definitely recommend reading it if you’re involved in change management in any way.

    Getting people through the transition is essential if the change is actually to work as planned. When a change happens without people going through a transition, it is just a rearrangement of the chairs.


    On change as a function of change management – people actually need to do things differently as a result.

    Changes of any sort—even though they may be justified in economic or technological terms—finally succeed or fail based on whether the people affected do things differently. Do the employees let go of the old way of doing things, go through that difficult time between the old way and the new, and come out doing things the new way? If companies don’t help employees through these phases even the most wonderful training programs often fall flat. The leaders forget endings and neutral zones; they try to start with the final stage of transition. And they can’t see what went wrong!

    On what people miss as they take people through change – leaders are fixated on the destination, but the people whose environment is being changed have to let go of things – and that is hard.

    Organizations overlook the letting-go process completely, however, and do nothing about the feelings of loss that it generates. And in overlooking those effects, they nearly guarantee that the transition will be mismanaged and that, as a result, the change will go badly. Unmanaged transition makes change unmanageable.

    The failure to identify and get ready for endings and losses is the largest difficulty for people in transition. And the failure to provide help with endings and losses leads to more problems for organizations in transition than anything else.

    If there is one thing that is harder than a difficult transition, it is a whole string of them occurring because somebody is pushing one change after another and forgetting about transition.

    It’s important to address the losses head on, and to allow space for (natural!) anxiety.

    Managers are sometimes worried about talking so openly, some even arguing that it will “stir up trouble” to acknowledge people’s feelings. What such an argument misses is that it is not talking about a loss but rather pretending that it doesn’t exist that stirs up trouble.

    Anxiety—silently expressed, a realistic fear of an unknown and probably difficult future or simply catastrophic fantasies. Anxiety is natural, so don’t make people feel stupid for feeling it. Just keep feeding them the information as it comes and empathize with them when it doesn’t.

    One of the most important leadership roles during times of change is that of putting into words what it is time to leave behind. Because talking about making a break with the past can upset its defenders, some leaders shy away from articulating just what it is time to say goodbye to. But in their unwillingness to say what it is time to let go of, they are jeopardizing the very change that they believe they are leading.

    On the need for empathy in managing transition – poor change managers focus on the process, rather than the people involved.

    The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.

    It ends with an excellent section on building trust – 10 very good points – that ends with this statement that is both simple and damning of those who fail.

    If all of this is too complicated to remember, and you want a single key to the building of trust, just remind yourself, “Tell the truth”.

  • Book: So You Want to Talk About Race

    Book: So You Want to Talk About Race

    41-hhzpuCRL._SL250_.jpgI read So You Want to Talk About Race (Amazon) after seeing my friend Jill tweet about it. As a white European, whilst I care about intersectionality and try to educate myself, I know there’s a lot I don’t know, and going deeper on this topic seemed like a good next step after reading Whipping Girl.

    The book opens with this paragraph, which captures so much.

    “But a centuries-old system of oppression and brutality is not an easy fix, and maybe we shouldn’t be looking for ways reads. I hope that if parts of this book make you uncomfortable, you can sit with that discomfort for a while, to see if it has anything else to offer you.”

    It’s not an easy read, because it’s full of injustice. Stories from Oluo’s personal experience, then contextualized with data – everything situated in the broader picture. It’s not an easy read, but it is extremely readable – I made my way through it in maybe a week.

    It’s hard to pull out highlights but for me two were the chapter on intersectionality and tone policing. The chapter on intersectionality was widely applicable and generally the best and most thorough explanation of what it is and why it’s important I have encountered. The chapter on tone policing really captured why it is such an enticing derailing tactic for people who – like that opening quote – are unable to sit with their discomfort.

    Finally, I appreciated how she made a clear differentiation between systematic and individual discrimination – how the need to critique each incident and determine racist: y/n distracts from the broader picture that is well founded on data. It can be hard to accept that intentions don’t matter – we see this everywhere when it comes to social justice – but perhaps the fact that intentions are meaningless in the face of systematic inequity is easier to accept, and that will encourage people to apologise, and push towards more meaningful change.

    Like Jill, I think it’s a must read.

  • Book: Whipping Girl

    Book: Whipping Girl

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    I read Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Amazon) pretty quickly – over the course of 8 days (most of which I was traveling). I sought out the recommendation because I was looking to better understand the experiences of trans women and their evolving (or not) medical support and rights. For context, I had considered myself moderately informed, but I was looking for something with more depth and breadth than anything I would find on Twitter.

    This book was a confronting read, but incredibly helpful, and exactly what I was looking for. I learned a lot reading it.

    Alongside it, I read A Safe Girl to Love (Amazon), which is a collection of short stories about trans women, written by a trans woman. My friend who told me about it suggested I might not enjoy it as I’m not a trans woman, however fiction – and other media like movies and TV – have the power to create empathy for people who are unlike ourselves. In practice, unfortunately, the centering of white men in popular media and the segregation of everything else to “special interest” creates a situation where everyone is trained to empathize with white men, and pretty much no one else.

    Of course, stories about marginalized people should ideally be written by marginalized people, or it risks reproducing harmful stereotypes and tropes, or else, becoming a sort of fetishized caricature. Why are cis women who mock “men who write women” happy to uncritically consume the equivalent about our trans sisters? The section on media in Whipping Girl deconstructed this thoroughly.

    One of the big things I wanted to better understand in this reading was dysphoria, and in that regard, both books were incredibly helpful. Whipping Girl outlines the idea of “subconscious sex,” and how that might be congruent (or not) with the sex our body is assigned by society. One important point she makes is that this idea of “a woman trapped in a man’s body” is a simplistic explanation for cis people. Or as another friend of mine, a trans woman, has quipped, “it’s not the wrong body, it’s the wrong society.”

    The book focuses on transmisogyny (the particularized form of misogyny that trans women experience), and one of the recurring themes is femininity and how femininity is devalued. And while I was reading the book to learn, this was something that resonated powerfully with my own experience of being a woman in the world, particularly in male-dominated environments. Though, I have learned, trans women experience this from all quarters.

    All in all, I definitely recommend it if you’re in the headspace for such a book. I learned a lot, and I expect that anyone who is not a trans woman would learn something too. Both books have inspired me to start thinking more about my own relationship to womanhood and femininity.

    Thanks to my friend Naomi, who improved and edited this post.

  • Book: The Brand Gap

    Book: The Brand Gap

    the-brand-gap.jpgI read The Brand Gap (Amazon) on the recommendation of my colleague Michelle. I  wanted to better understand what branding is, how it works, how it fits in with marketing etc. At the end of it, I bought her a small gift which demonstrated that I had understood the book.

    The gift was a Yoko Ono seed, which has the word “LOVE” engraved on it. It turns into a leaf with the word “LOVE” on that. This so well demonstrated what I learned in the book – that branding is about aligning the story told about you internally with what gets said about you externally – because brand is what people say about you. This is obviously a lot easier said than done, and requires a lot of thought and care for both internal and external communications.

    The book is a little dated now (one chapter on digital was a bit bizarre to read in 2018) but I learned a lot from it, and it’s worth a read if you’re looking to understand more about these topics, too.

     

  • Book: Org Design for Design Orgs

    Book: Org Design for Design Orgs

    org-design-for-design.jpgI read Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams (Amazon) on the recommendation of my team mate, Matt Miklic.

    I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 18 months working with Matt on how engineering teams can work better with designers, and I wish I’d read this book earlier! It was really helpful for understanding the different kinds of designers and how designers can work together. It was also really helpful to understand how design can work in larger scale organizations and gave some helpful context for some changes we’ve been making internally.

    One of the things I found really interesting about the model of the centralized design team is how it mirrors the centralized mobile team (which is what we have at Automattic), with similar pros and cons. I’ve been thinking for a while that for a centralized mobile team to work, the mobile team has to be great at collaborating with other teams. This book inspired some thinking around what that looks like.

    As I read the book, however, I was wondering how this model worked with the way engineering teams are typically structured, so I was disappointed to see no practical suggestions there – but that being left as an open question.

    I’d definitely say the book is worth reading though, if you have any interest in design at scale and organisational design in general (but particularly for design).

     

  • Book: Finite and Infinite Games

    Book: Finite and Infinite Games

    finite-and-infinite-games.jpgFinite and Infinite Games (Amazon) was my final piece of assigned reading for the AltMBA I took last summer. I don’t know why it was on the list, and having read it I still don’t know what it’s about. It reads like someone got incredibly high and saw the meaning of life, which they then articulated at excessive length without making any sense.

    I went to read the reviews on Amazon and so many are really positive. I really don’t get it. For me it’s a definite Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, Go Straight to Jail. Nope!

  • Book: Playing Big

    Book: Playing Big

    playing-big.jpgPlaying Big (Amazon) was a gift from Jean Hsu, and I loved it. It articulated things that I had noticed, and opened my eyes to things I had not. Super helpful. A few highlights:

    • I’m over the inner critic (perhaps a topic for another post), but I loved the idea of the inner mentor. The idea we have a voice that guides us forward and believes in us is really powerful. It’s a helpful way to access that which we know but we’re afraid of.
    • It had the most helpful advice on balancing niceness and assertiveness I have found. Firstly, going into the kind of hedging and apologising language that serves to make us smaller. But then not just removing it, but adding warmth and personal connection. Amazing.
    • I found the section on over-preparing really helpful. I’ve been served well by over-preparing, but being committed to that strategy makes sudden change or being put on the spot stressful. Now I’m thinking about how to deploy that work ethic when useful… but be more flexible and truth in my own knowledge when it’s not useful (or possible).

    As I was reading it, I was recommending it to people and thinking about people I know who would benefit from it. Definitely worth a read if you’re feeling like you’re not doing everything you’re potentially capable of. The only caveat I have is that it focused on the gender binary.