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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

#101

Post by drited »

klenwell wrote: post #89
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…

Well stated. Bookmarked. One additional bullet point I would add: Hiring. If an isolated HR unit controls hiring and freezes the hiring managers and team out of the process, or effectively alienates them, you're wasting a huge amount of energy. This is part of the methodology I try to weave into my organizations: - A thoughtful and literate job posting, purged of gratuitous jargon, will accurately describe the job an…

If I remember correctly Kahneman said not to do this though and to just go by the quantitative evaluation you mentioned in the previous point. 'Final decision will be a collective decision of the hiring team'

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

#102

Post by darkerside »

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…

A few thoughts.

If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers.

One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.

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

#103

Post by nefitty »

jen729w wrote: post #98
padraic7a wrote: post #97

Is it very narrow minded of me to think that, even for HN, recognising "culture" as "company culture" demonstrates a very blinkered view of the world?

I think it’s okay to recognise the shorthand and not feel bad about it. The author of this article clearly doesn’t think he’s describing all culture. I didn’t from the link title. We’re humans, we cut corners. We all understand the intent.

I didn't understand the poster's intent until I read some of these comments. I thought the article was going to be about human culture in general.

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

#104

Post by akvadrako »

padraic7a wrote: post #97

Is it very narrow minded of me to think that, even for HN, recognising "culture" as "company culture" demonstrates a very blinkered view of the world?

I found it quite strange too. Saw two different versions of the HN title before I clicked, only because it seemed so ridiculous.

Maybe it's just click bait; hard to imagine people think more about company culture than culture in general.

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

#105

Post by closeparen »

darkerside wrote: post #102
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…

A few thoughts. If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers. One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.

A senior leader wouldn’t be caught dead holding the same position for more than 18 months. The whole game is to make a huge lift, collect the monetary and prestige rewards, and move on to the next thing before burnout becomes apparent.

Sustainability is the domain of entrenched/ossified/bureaucratic middle managers, moderating or outright sabotaging whatever BS senior leadership is excited about this month.

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

#106

Post by DenisM »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #99
DenisM wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I think this makes me a consultant (smile) Yes, it does boil down to questions. However questions drive out language, so simply saying that "scrutinizing the question" is the real work is both true and incomplete. It is an important point, though. Thank you.

> I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I think this makes me a consultant (smile)

It may or may not, naturally.

> questions drive out language

What do you mean by this?

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

#107

Post by lucianomt »

AdamM12 wrote: post #84
thatguy_2016 wrote: post #14

"Turn the ship around" is one of my favorite books too; most leadership books follow the same formula- everything is broken, the consultant arrives with a magic fix, and voila! Unicorns start flying. "Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked the approach. A very honest, no BS book. Highly recommended

If you like that you should read "About Face" by David Hackworth. I have not read it but I've hear about it via the Jocko Podcast.

I cannot recommend "About Face" enough. However it is a long read and covers the whole life story of Colonel Hack.

Instead you might want to check out "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts" where he focuses specifically on the time when he turned around the worst fighting battalion in Vietnam.

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

#108

Post by milesvp »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #67
mcguire wrote: post #63

" This makes me wonder whether a good way to make needed change as a leader when there is no obvious crisis is to artificially create one so that people get on board… " Yes. You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken. As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just continue floundering, wasting money…

I don't intentional break things just to create crisis, but I have pushed for change that I know highlights problems and forces us to address them. For example, after many acquisitions by our company you could still identify the old companies by the insular cultural characteristics of siloed product teams; I pushed very hard to restructure teams and this required learning how to cumminicate and collaborate with new p…

It’s crazy how long mergers and aquisitions can be seen in IT infrastructure. There are always little warts here and there, and if someone was around for it they can say, oh yeah, we had to deal with such and such a team’s way of doing things. And the naming, always you see random names of things that basically no longer exist, but the names live on because some script names some report based on a system that existed 10 years ago.

The archeology of IT systems is part of what I liked about supporting legacy systems.

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

#109

Post by proc0 »

darkerside wrote: post #102
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…

A few thoughts. If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers. One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.

I actually think current "leadership" is on its way to being extinct. It will be replaced by algorithms and best practices, along with better tools. If you're not contributing to code, there will be very little room for them in the software company of the future. The concepts that non-technical leaders have to learn are trivial compared to the advanced techniques of software development.

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

#110

Post by henrikschroder »

proc0 wrote: post #109
darkerside wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few thoughts. If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers. One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.

I actually think current "leadership" is on its way to being extinct. It will be replaced by algorithms and best practices, along with better tools. If you're not contributing to code, there will be very little room for them in the software company of the future. The concepts that non-technical leaders have to learn are trivial compared to the advanced techniques of software development.

If leading people is so goddamn easy compared to software engineering, why do so few engineers want to move into people leadership, and why do so many of them absolutely suck at it?

I think you are severely discounting the skills it takes to lead people, and you are also making an extremely optimistic assumption that companies in the future somehow would be magically more meritocratic than existing companies, when there's no evidence of the sort. On the contrary, people with great interpersonal skills will continue to advance off of the labour of the people with only great technical skill.

Your glorious engineer's revolution will probably not come to pass if history is any indication.

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