Office Management Excellence Community Recommended Books

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

by Patrick Lencioni

Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules

by Steve McConnell

Now, Discover Your Strengths

by Marcus Buckingham

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

by Michael Lopp

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

by Tom DeMarco

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Dynamics of Software Development

by Michele McCarthy

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

by Donald G. Reinertsen

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

by Marshall Goldsmith

The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

by Stephen M.R. Covey

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

by Marcus Buckingham

Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and

by Tony Schwartz

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

by Tom DeMarco

Working Together: A Personality Centered Approach To Management

by Olaf Isachsen

Out of the Crisis

by W. Edwards Deming

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education

by W. Edwards Deming

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

by Peter M. Senge

Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

by Erik Brynjolfsson

Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow

by Chip Conley

The Fiefdom Syndrome

by Robert J. Herbold

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

by Clayton M. Christensen

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation

by Edgar H. Schein

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround

by Louis V. Gerstner

Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story

by Peter Guber

Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

by Adam M. Grant

Keeping people really matters

Tech companies do a generally poor job at keeping employees from leaving, and replacing people is really hard.

Zach Holman (Github) recently posted a deck on this topic.

Thoughts on on-boarding new hires

Bad onboarding:

• A top-down marathon of meetings with tiers of managers and painfully boring training videos
• New recruits treated like helpless new kids.

A better on-boarding:

• Giving new recruits a very safe way to actually do, learning by doing is actually the best way to learn anything
• Since building software is a social activity, giving them an opportunity to work with different teams and different code bases across the organization. This also helps communicating the big picture and the endless opportunities at the company.

What is an Enterprise Social Network?

An Enterprise Social Network is a media to connect individuals who share similar business interests or activities.

Social tools can help employees to access the knowledge and resources they need to work together effectively and solve business problems.

Set Up a Virtualhost for Your Rails App on Localhost on OSX

You can map http://myapp.dev:80 to http://localhost:3000 easily.

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

According to the book, the five dysfunctions are:

• Absence of trust—unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
• Fear of conflict—seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
• Lack of commitment—feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
• Avoidance of accountability—ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
• Inattention to results—focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

Patrick Lencioni's The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

There are three areas in addressing job misery.

• People must feel that what they do is relevant and important. ("irrelevance")
• People must feel that they are known and cared about. ("anonymity")
• People thrive in an environment where they are given feedback. ("immeasurement")

"Managers who take the time to get to know their people on a personal basis and help them connect what they do with why it is important, go a long way toward engaging the heart, mind and soul of their team. To keep the "what and why" top-of-mind with employees, successful managers use performance measures to provide feedback to each individual so each one can self manage toward better outcomes."

"You don’t grow companies, you grow people and people grow companies"

Git Grep with Git Blame

If you ever wished you could run git blame on the results of git grep then have a look at this

How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub

I finally got to see Zach Holman's talk on 'How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub', it was great.

He describes a process based on a simple branching strategy; branching master to a feature branch, when finished merged back or thrown away, also open a pull request to welcome discussion around the code/feature/strategy and guarantee quality.

Master is always deployable and passes CI, so everyone can push to master and everyone can deploy, which let people have responsibility over their code and frees up time from micromanaging someone else's code.