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The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

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Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#71

Post by tensor »

dkarl wrote: post #65
tensor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that many people believe "empowerment" means "do whatever the fuck I want." At any company you are going to have objectives and goals, and empowerment means getting the responsibility to make the hard trade offs yourself. It doesn't mean you can do something outside of the corporate goals, and it doesn't mean you can just ignore some of the challenging parts of the job like delivering a working product…

The problem is theres's no natural distinction between "what" and "how." Every aspect of how you do your job is meaningful in some way. You have to have a good understanding with your boss about where you have discretion to follow your judgment and where you don't.

That's probably one of the most important things a good boss can do: give exactly that clarity. Define the lane you can run in, and point to the place we want to get.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#72

Post by [deleted] »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #66

My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV): 1. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to fi…

[deleted]

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#73

Post by kfk »

DenisM wrote: post #70
nogabebop23 wrote: post #66

My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV): 1. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to fi…

Can you supply some examples of good goals? Thank.

Not the parent but a good goal for me is a goal that will stand the test of time. If your change is fundamentally a good one and is part of a strong industry trend it will more likely succeed. I have been pushing a consolidation system for finance (2,000+ finance professionals where I work) over the past 3 years, only lately it's picking up steam with the leadership. If I had been pushing a change that was not so strongly trended (automation and all) I would have failed because something else would have come up as "best practice" in the industry. This does not mean you just go with the industry and become a "benchmark" monkey, hype is still a problem. Take AI, Big Data, etc., those are not so good trends to latch on today because they seem to be too hyped. But it means you stay real with yourself, your company and, most disregarded, your industry.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#74

Post by skittleson »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #66

My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV): 1. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to fi…

Those insights are right on. I respect those dev managers beyond measure... they have to say no often and deal with the org red tape.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#76

Post by DenisM »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #51
auto wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then a slow die-off until the next book. I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things. What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done, and more li…

Like you describe, I just kept sucking it all in, consuming as much as I could. I have self-taught through a few of these subjects. I don't have an answer for you, but I have an answer for me. Perhaps sharing my answer might help you too. I hope so. These are unsolved problems, that's why the material keeps getting produced. I think if you can find inspiration or a good "nutritional meal" to last for a while, it's a…

An unsolicited advice that might cut your learning time in half:

Every book gives advice, every advice is an answer to a question. Ignore the answer, but scrutinize the question.

For example: "embrace remote work, go remote-first even!" says one book, "face-to-face is the only thing that works in the face of inevitable confusion and complexity" says another. Not helpful, right? However, consider that the first author got good result with remote work, and the second one got great results in-office. The two may have had different circumstances which they fail to describe for the reason you're describing the air you are breathing - being very immersed in something makes that something invisible. So a question to ponder then: under what circumstances is remote work possible, and if/how can one modify those circumstances?

Scrutinizing the question is a lot more work than getting excited with the first answer that came your way, but it's that much more likely to yield applicable result on top of a bout of enthusiasm.

Also, thanks for [The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups] suggestion.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#77

Post by skittleson »

keiferski wrote: post #15
colechristensen wrote: post #2

Does anyone have book suggestions on leadership and management which aren't just pop-business BS?

Skip the business books and just study the lives of great leaders. Personally I recommend Napoleon, Orson Welles, Kurosawa, Fellini and Hitchcock. Basically anyone that was consistently productive in a group-based endeavor.

I'm dumbfounded... this totally makes sense. I know what my holiday reading will consist of now. Business books with no actionable or repetitive content bores me after awhile. The last few years I've been getting the cliff notes first then if I find any substance in that, I buy the book.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#78

Post by hughpeters »

Here's the "Non-Bullshit Book on Culture" book this post discusses:

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet

Also here's a great speech given by the David Marquet (with drawings!) on the same topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#79

Post by throwaway2048 »

vosper wrote: post #68
paulcole wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it Is it possible to downvote a submission? I thought you could only upvote and flag?

When your internet points on HN exceed some threshold you may be able to downvote. I’ve heard there’s also a thing called a supervote. (I have neither of these privileges)

This is not true, no matter how much karma you have, you can never downvote stories on HN, only flag.

Super down voting is something only mods can do (maintains the story, but it gets nuked off the site index)

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#80

Post by harimau777 »

cushychicken wrote: post #57
netcan wrote: post #52

To some extent, I'm no longer curious about "leadership" ideas about organisational culture. I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale. Maybe motivation/attitudes can be improved and a naval hierarchy can work better, but this is not the typical issue in corporate culture. I'm curious about structural answers.…

>I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with you - on the one hand, this statement seems wrong, but on the other hand, everything else you said makes a ton of sense to me. Everyone seems so caught up by culture these days that they forget the other big part of the leader…

How would you approach customizing the process to the individual or to a given circumstance?

For example, I had a situation where I had a story to write functional tests for a piece of our software. The story's scope had creeped (there turned out to be disagreement between different levels of leadership over what the tests should cover), but I had reached a point where I had implemented roughly 80% of the tests that we needed. I submitted a pull request for the progress that I had made so that it could be "locked in" and I could get it out of my mental overhead. However, the person who reviewed the PR refused to merge it because we apparently had a policy that each story could only have one PR. Ultimately, the overhead of trying to get everything in all at once resulted in the story not being successful.

Although maybe that example illustrates your point about the importance of process, because I had been asking for weeks for us to actually have sprint planning so that I could break up the story, but it kept getting canceled because people felt that they were too busy.

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