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The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read
- gregdoesit 7y agoThis book has had the single biggest influence on how I motivate and lead engineering teams[1]. It's an easy read, and the main thought on delegating decisions down hold very well for software engineering, and on how to create a culture of high-autonomy, high-performance. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-a-leader/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-...
- colechristensen 7y agoDoes anyone have book suggestions on leadership and management which aren't just pop-business BS?
- jdsnape 7y agoI rate 'High output management' by Andrew Grove (founder & CEO of Intel). He has clearly lived a lot of the experiences he wrote about and the advice was pretty timeless.
- tdrgabi 7y ago"An elegant puzzle" is also a book with a lot of meat on it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jbc1 7y agoReview by Ben Horowitz: https://a16z.com/2015/11/13/high-output-management/ https://a16z.com/2015/11/13/high-output-management/
- trwhite 7y agoHis other book "Only The Paranoid Survive" also contains some useful advice, albeit can be a little repetitive.
- gherkinnn 7y agoI gave “Leaders eat last” a try, but found it unreadable. It starts with SEALs in Afghanistan, because of course it does, and then the author loosely strings together a bunch of unconvincing anecdotes to support his core idea. The worst part is his constant reference to various hormones and fight or flight responses in a superficial way that would make even TEDx feel ashamed. Edit: there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the military can produce outstanding leaders. Humans have been battling for too long as not to have developed specialised training systems. My gripe is with the book alone.
- gonzo41 7y agoIf your looking at the military for examples I would suggest you have a read of a conventional leadership manual like what the MOD put out for Sandhurst. http://www.ceptm.iue.edu.ar/pdf/ADR002383-developingLeaders.pdf http://www.ceptm.iue.edu.ar/pdf/ADR002383-developingLeaders.... Obviously office work isn't the Army and you really shouldn't frame your work like a battle but generally. Everyone has a job, they are the one doing it so they are best to do it. Be professional, respectful and share a vision and you'll see people you lead follow you and mirror those traits. Your culture will start to reflect the environment you create.
- gherkinnn 7y agoThanks! Will do.
- arethuza 7y agoI don't think I'd ever read a book purely on 'leadership' but I read a fair bit of military history and there is no doubt that there are some examples of outstanding leadership to be found there.
- gav 7y agoI really like "The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay, who's a military historian/management consultant. It's interesting to compare the Taylor vs. Drucker view on management against the Bülow vs. Clausewitz view on war.
- _pmf_ 7y agoAnother book from the military space is "Extreme Leadership" (which also puts emphasis on "leading up"). But it's definitely also pop.
- baxtr 7y agoI can recommend “Radical Candor”
- gexla 7y agoI like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. Points pulled from real experience. For me, this adds context and makes a book readable. If you don't learn anything, then at least you might get to read a good story. The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach) Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar) To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull) Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace the "lineage" to see where the starting points were. The trash today won't be a thing 50 years from now. So, maybe look at books from 50 years ago or more.
- trwhite 7y ago+1 for all of these. Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are" is also well written and quite entertaining. There's a good mix of personal experience, humour and history.
- rimliu 7y ago+1 for Creativity, Inc. (haven't read the others on the list). I also liked both books by Ricardo Semler a lot (Maverick and Seven Days Weekend).
- teddyh 7y ago> I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) also fits this description.
- jtms 7y agoWhy is this being downvoted? Did Scott Adams get cancelled or something?
- gexla 7y agoMaybe explain how it fits. All the books I mentioned were written about these people running or being placed at a high level in these organizations and making decisions which had a substantial impact on them. Does Scott Adams cover this in his book or did he largely work solo?
- keiferski 7y agoSkip 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.
- brain5ide 7y agoThis is a bloody good constraint. Thanks.
- skittleson 7y agoI'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.
- pjc50 7y agoIf I may ask for something a bit more radical: workable suggestions on leadership of diverse teams? The military-based ones tend to be a bit too macho for applicability outside that environment. Even more so for leadership within loose and/or voluntary organisations such as open source projects.
- FeistySkink 7y agoWhile not exactly a book on leadership, I've picked up quite a few valuable lessons from 'Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed' by Ben R. Rich.
- kqr 7y agoI've read and enjoyed a bit by Edwards Deming recently, specifically Out of the Crisis and The New Economics.
- Tomte 7y agoNew Economics is good if you make it through the first chapters, which are more or less "old man yells at cloud" or "what I've always wanted to say". They are highly political, the subjects range from how bad anti-cartel law is to telephones to hitting children. When he finally gets to special causes vs. common causes, control charts etc. the book gets quite good.
- kqr 7y agoI agree, though I also think it is hard not to be political when you start seeing things through the lens of special vs common causes. So much of the rhetoric in politics surrounds taking a common cause produced by a system working as designed and treating it as a special cause to rally people behind. To the long-term detriment of society, in part because the adjustments promised frequently ruin the system that actually worked fairly well, and because trillions is earmarked for chasing ghosts getting nowhere.
- chrisseaton 7y agoRead military leadership manuals, like Serve to Lead. Any business leadership book is likely to really be a management book.
- tnolet 7y agoPeopleware is awesome https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-DeMarco/dp/0932633439 https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-De...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kitsune_ 7y agoDeming
- thatguy_2016 7y ago"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
- zwischenzug 7y agoYeah, that's the joy of it. Mis-steps, and dark nights of the soul and all. That's the reality of leadership; it's poking around in the dark.
- AdamM12 7y agoIf 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.
- lucianomt 7y agoI 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.
- AdamM12 7y agoYeah heard that was good too. Thanks for the tip. I feel like that would give you the real details that one would need to know for a situation like that.
- yannis7 7y agoas @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice on historical / biographical books. For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.
- perl4ever 7y ago"primadonna scientists" Feynman's shenanigans at Los Alamos are famous due to his memoirs, but at the time, he was not an important person, was he? Is it possible that peoples' viewpoints are distorted by this? Also, the Apollo program seems more impressive and worth studying than the atomic bomb to me. Like, in one case, they produced unprecedentedly large explosions, and in the other, they did that and balanced people on top and got them to the moon and back.
- gtirloni 7y agoSome good pirate ship techniques in a Navy submarine.
- walterkrankheit 7y agoAll good points, although "rather than just punishing, he spent 8 hours discussing with his team"...? There needs to be less punishment as methodology out there, but an eight-hour discussion IS a form of punishment in my book. And for everyone else, too.
- zwischenzug 7y agoThey discussed for 8 hours because they had to figure out how to avoid a repeat in a practical way. The discussion was not with the offender, but among the leadership team.
- mcguire 7y agoAt NASA, this is called a "Root Cause Analysis" or RCA. A multi-hour meeting all about punishing the guilty via embarrassment or at least making sure you can shed the guilt. On the other hand, "announce what you are about to do" is likely the best way to solve the problem.
- itronitron 7y agoI had my hopes up, but this is about Team Culture (not Culture)
- classified 7y agoFerengi Rules of Acquisition #239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product. Also, exquisite irony serving up a "non-bullshit" book with the requisite amount of bullshit to make up for it. After all, the total amount of bullshit in the universe can never be reduced, only increased.
- Tomte 7y agoOr better yet, The Culture (Iain Banks).
- DanielBMarkham 7y agoThis reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off. I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book. Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in 3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't. For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before. This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you do so.
- auto 7y ago> 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 like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat. I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.
- DanielBMarkham 7y ago
- artsyca 7y agoI've worked at all sorts of companies but it's actually been the same company over and over it's the broken top down hierarchy mixed with control dramas and disempowerment where initiative is punishable and the only way to get ahead is to strike a deal with some kind of clique at the expense of the client It's refreshing to know this book exists and I'll certainly look it up but I have zero hope for so called corporate culture because it's lemmings all the way down and lead follow or get out of the way is blocked by some callous know it all opening their yawning pie hole to dish out googlisms
- zwischenzug 7y agoYes, the writer talks about his failed attempts when he was not in charge of the whole boat in the book.
- thrav 7y ago“the only way to get ahead is to strike a deal with some kind of clique at the expense of the client” Ugh, it makes me sick how true this is, and how much shit I take for refusing to go along with it.
- tensor 7y agoThe 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 to customers in a timely fashion.
- dkarl 7y agoThe 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.
- s_Hogg 7y agowishfully, I read this as a "Book on the Culture". Does anyone know of such a thing, aside from the actual Iain M Banks novels?
- goblin89 7y ago“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”. Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity… Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than “X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.) It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless statement.
- ikurei 7y ago> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...] I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach. What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.
- jcbrand 7y agoEven if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily rule out complexity as the cause of failure. It's a question of how far you zoom in or out. In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).
- mekoka 7y agoThe complete tweet was: Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure. Fucking get specific. So you agree with its author.
- mistrial9 7y agosome authors try to distinguish complexity from .. hm.. "chaotic" ? in that, complex means a lot of working parts to form an action chain (or similar) .. contrast to other systems that are not knowable or repeatable, like actual economic systems, or an enterprise of humans doing a business function, including the considerations of humans Engineers are often taught to simplify and clarify, for great result.. but not all systems are actually decomposable that way .. some schools of business management too.. So a moving, non-trivial, not-reproducible system of systems cannot be considered 'broken' because.. there is no substitute for it to test a fix
- cslawson 7y agoThere's a really great animation done on top of a talk by David Marquet which summarizes the book, I believe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm4mCn5x5iM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm4mCn5x5iM
- seamyb88 7y agoThe sequel to the book on getting one's culture from a boat full of people prepared to blow huge chunks out of the world, potentially killing millions, is a wonderful look at the managerial qualities of the Nazi party in 1933.
- lha 7y agoI will definitely read this book. I recommend Leadership is Half The Story. https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership-Collaboration-ebook/dp/B00T9Z29NS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=122I85SFS55J&keywords=leadership+is+half+the+story&qid=1575036651&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&sprefix=leadership+is+half%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership-Co...
- netcan 7y agoTo 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. A lot of culture comes down to how success and failure work. If a company culture is bad at risk-taking and internal entrepreneurship, a "culture of openness" can't fix it. To get genuinely failure tolerant and opportunity seeking, organisations need to structure for successes and failures. How are resources really allocated in the company? How are successes and failures really determined and what are the real ramifications. So... (a) organisations need some formal/mechanical processes governing the pertinent decisions: resources and goals. Formal processes can be examined more honestly and biased to (or against) risk. (b) If you really opportunity-seeking, risk taking culture... then you need "money-where-mouth-is" mechanics. It doesn't need to be fully "market-based," but someone needs to be throwing themselves behind opportunities because they think that they'll be successful. The problem that runs through both Google (eg) and the naval ship is a culture of "do enough, and no more." The solution is usually to raise the "enough" bar somehow... motivation, discipline. That works when what you want from employ/organisations is "enough." If you want more than enough, I think the structure needs to change.
- cushychicken 7y ago>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 leadership battle: process. Nobody on HN likes to hear it. It's unsexy, and, to a creative type (like a designer, PM, or, to some extent, SW engineer), threatening. At the end of the day, though, people don't scale. Processes do. I believe good leadership has a lot to do with setting up good processes. Edit: maybe I'm wrong, but tons of companies humbleblog on HN about their brilliant cultures. Very few of them open the kimono on their processes. Largely, I think, because those are what really make their businesses money.
- bluedino 7y agoThis book explained a lot about a boss of mine. Ex-military, tried to run our department like a battalion, took pride in "battlefield repairs" of code, never let anyone think for themselves or contribute. Only communicating through superiors...Micromanaging at its best, it was an all-out terrible way of doing things.
- mcguire 7y ago"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 and time. You have to wait until it's completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me to take it over?" and not have interference. I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like agent provocateur stuff.
- nogabebop23 7y agoI 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 people. Now we've acquired more companies and (while in hindsight I guess I should have seen this coming) I'm learning this is an ongoing challenge that I treated as a one-off project.
- milesvp 7y agoIt’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.
- nogabebop23 7y agoMy 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 figure out how to position and leverage individuals. 2. Actually, genuinely, caring about your direct reports goes a very long way towards solving a lot of culture problems but... 3. Dev Managers need to put a lot of effort out into their teams to drive change and it is often (most of the time?) not returned. Your biggest enemy is not active sabotage, it's apathy at all levels of the organization. I started pushing for some specific cultural-ish changes about this time last year and, while I was given passive approval & support and lots of latitude to make change, it has been physically exhausting. If I was in an organization that didn't even give me this much freedom it would have been exhausting and pointless. 4. A Dev Manager can make localized changes when not all teams want or can reciprocate, but I'm not convinced yet that the requisite firewalls you need to erect aren't ultimately harmful in the long run. It is a very delicate balance. In the end my take-away is you need space and time to make any meaningful change, and even that is limited by the crushing inertia of the organization. For me personally it has been physically consuming and I have 6 month & 1 year goals, plus an overall 3-year plan that I'll either complete in the coming year or look for an new opportunity elsewhere.
- DenisM 7y agoCan you supply some examples of good goals? Thank.
- kfk 7y agoNot 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.
- tempsy 7y agoWonder if anyone on here has read Ben Horowitz's latest book on culture "What You Do Is Who You Are"? I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over the top so far...
- trwhite 7y agoIt's worth sticking with. Later on he draws more on some of his personal experience (similar to THTAHT) and there are some hilarious anecdotes.
- steele 7y agoleader-leader only works if the commitment and incentives are relatively uniform.
- hughpeters 7y agoHere'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8
- caiocaiocaio 7y agoThe fact that headline points out that it's not bullshit makes it sound like bullshit. When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?
- icelancer 7y agoWell, we don't really have a choice in Seattle / SF; they hang those signs in every restaurant.
- therealdrag0 7y agoBut the sign's content is chosen by external audit right? That's different.
- padraic7a 7y agoIs 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?
- jen729w 7y agoI 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.
- nefitty 7y agoI 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.
- akvadrako 7y agoI 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.
- stjohnswarts 7y agothat's why you click on the article and see what it's about.
- drodio 7y ago@ianmiell awesome post. Part of the issue: The word “culture” does not fully describe the intentional “Org OS” choices that need to be made to optimize how people can better work in a knowledge economy. https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/ https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/
- jksmith 7y agopeople need to be told what to do loop people wait do only what they're told; people need to be told what to do; if people don't have to be told what to do, exit; end Deming made this observation 50 years ago.
- ajcarpy2005 7y agoI recommend The Rise of the Creative Class.