Managing Humans


Book Description

Managing Humans is a selection of the best essays from Michael Lopp's popular website Rands in Repose(www.randsinrepose.com). Lopp is one of the most sought-after IT managers in Silicon Valley, and draws on his experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland. This book reveals a variety of different approaches for creating innovative, happy development teams. It covers handling conflict, managing wildly differing personality types, infusing innovation into insane product schedules, and figuring out how to build lasting and useful engineering culture. The essays are biting, hilarious, and always informative.







Project Management for Humans


Book Description

Project management—it’s not just about following a template or using a tool, but rather developing personal skills and intuition to find a method that works for everyone. Whether you’re a designer or a manager, Project Management for Humans will help you estimate and plan tasks, scout and address issues before they become problems, and communicate with and hold people accountable.




Managing the Unmanageable


Book Description

“Mantle and Lichty have assembled a guide that will help you hire, motivate, and mentor a software development team that functions at the highest level. Their rules of thumb and coaching advice are great blueprints for new and experienced software engineering managers alike.” —Tom Conrad, CTO, Pandora “I wish I’d had this material available years ago. I see lots and lots of ‘meat’ in here that I’ll use over and over again as I try to become a better manager. The writing style is right on, and I love the personal anecdotes.” —Steve Johnson, VP, Custom Solutions, DigitalFish All too often, software development is deemed unmanageable. The news is filled with stories of projects that have run catastrophically over schedule and budget. Although adding some formal discipline to the development process has improved the situation, it has by no means solved the problem. How can it be, with so much time and money spent to get software development under control, that it remains so unmanageable? In Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams , Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty answer that persistent question with a simple observation: You first must make programmers and software teams manageable. That is, you need to begin by understanding your people—how to hire them, motivate them, and lead them to develop and deliver great products. Drawing on their combined seventy years of software development and management experience, and highlighting the insights and wisdom of other successful managers, Mantle and Lichty provide the guidance you need to manage people and teams in order to deliver software successfully. Whether you are new to software management, or have already been working in that role, you will appreciate the real-world knowledge and practical tools packed into this guide.







The Software Developer's Career Handbook


Book Description

At some point in your career, you'll realize there's more to being a software engineer than dealing with code. Is it time to become a manager? Or join a startup? In this insightful and entertaining book, Michael Lopp recalls his own make-or-break moments with Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Slack, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, and Symantec to help you make better, more mindful career decisions. With more than 40 stand-alone stories, Lopp walks through a complete job lifecycle, starting with the interview and ending with the realization that it might be time to move on. You'll learn how to handle baffling circumstances in your job, understand what you want from your career, and discover how to thrive in your workplace. Learn how to navigate areas of your job that don't involve writing code Identify how the aspects you enjoy will affect your next career steps Build and maintain key relationships and interactions within your community Make choices that will help you have a "deliberate career" Recognize what's important to your manager and work on things that matter




The Art of Leadership


Book Description

Many people think leadership is a higher calling that resides exclusively with a select few who practice and preach big, complex leadership philosophies. But as this practical book reveals, what’s most important for leadership is principled consistency. Time and again, small things done well build trust and respect within a team. Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. Lopp has been speaking and writing about this topic for over a decade and now maintains a Slack leadership channel with over 13,000 members. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders—as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.




Human Sigma


Book Description

Six Sigma changed the face of manufacturing quality. Now, HumanSigma is poised to do the same for sales and service organizations. Human Sigma offers an innovative, research-based approach to one of the toughest challenges businesses face today: how to effectively manage the employee-customer encounter to drive business success. Based on research spanning 10 million employees and 10 million customers around the world, the Human Sigma approach combines a proven method for assessing the health of the employee-customer encounter with a disciplined process for improving it. Human Sigma is based on five rules to bring excellence to how employees engage and interact with customers: RULE #1: E Pluribus Unum. Employee and customer experiences must be managed together — not as separate entities. RULE #2: Feelings Are Facts. Emotions drive and shape the employee-customer encounter. RULE #3: Think Globally, Measure and Act Locally. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed at the local level. RULE #4: There Is One Number You Need to Know. Employee and customer engagement interact to drive enhanced financial performance. And this interaction can be quantified and summarized with a single performance metric. RULE #5: If You Pray for Potatoes, You Better Grab a Hoe. Good intentions alone do not constitute a plan of action. Sustainable improvement in the employee-customer encounter requires disciplined local action coupled with a companywide commitment to changing how employees are recruited, positioned in roles, rewarded and recognized, and importantly, how they are managed. Essential reading for global business leaders, Human Sigma shows how sales and service companies can flourish in the new global economy. It reveals a profoundly different method for managing human systems for growth. Blending strategic analysis with hands-on, practical steps and advice, Human Sigma will change how you view your work, your employees and your customers forever.




The Trust Triangle


Book Description

Trust is the foundation of all meaningful relationships, yet 70 per cent of professionals don’t trust their managers. It’s a number that actually surprises few but profoundly concerns most of the awesome thought leaders alive today. From Simon Sinek to Patrick Lencioni, Paul Zak to Brené Brown, all agree that a lack of trust is the root of faltering relationships and mediocrity at work. What galvanised Matthew Davies to write this book was the lack of tools to address this appalling problem. There wasn’t a clear—or, more importantly—practical roadmap for building trust that centred on one of the most important relationships at work—you and your manager. By implementing The Trust Triangle, you can now offer teams an environment where you (the manager) and they (your team) can genuinely flourish at work, unburdened by the baggage of a people manager without people management skills. Here’s the business case in a nutshell. According to a massive study by Gallup, managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement scores. So, if you want to build trust and increase performance at work, this book is for you. Trust is the highest form of human motivation - Stephen Covey




HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People, Vol. 2 (with bonus article “The Feedback Fallacy” by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall)


Book Description

Are you a good boss--or a great one? Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you master the innumerable challenges of being a manager. With insights from leading experts including Marcus Buckingham, Michael D. Watkins, and Linda Hill, this book will inspire you to: Draw out your employees' signature strengths Support a culture of honesty and civility Cultivate better communication and deeper trust among global teams Give feedback that will help your people excel Hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults Motivate your employees through small wins Foster collaboration and break down silos across your company This collection of articles includes "Are You a Good Boss--or a Great One?," by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback; "Let Your Workers Rebel," by Francesca Gino; "The Feedback Fallacy," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "The Power of Small Wins," by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer; "The Price of Incivility," by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson; "What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women," by Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely; "How Netflix Reinvented HR," by Patty McCord; "Leading the Team You Inherit," by Michael D. Watkins; "The Overcommitted Organization," by Mark Mortensen and Heidi K. Gardner; "Global Teams That Work," by Tsedal Neeley; "Creating the Best Workplace on Earth," by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones.