Leadership Management-Business Mentoring

Coaching for Performance: The Principles & Practice of Coaching & Leadership

The field of workplace management has moved, in recent decades, from just being about organizing people for financial profits to also incorporating social and even spiritual values into employees’ career development. Today, good employees demand not just a paycheck but a place where they can grow and develop in some way. How are managers to avoid being caught flat-footed to these changing circumstances? Most managers lead by how they’ve been managed in the past, and…

Continue reading

Leadership Management-Business

Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

As Gordon Torr shares, creativity is a driving force of modern economies and of civilization. While productivity remains important, only innovation can give a company or a society a let up on the other. Unfortunately, few people are highly creative – a trait that requires both talent and nurturing. Managing talent in a way that leads to productive results is its own challenge with its own nuance. Torr shares some thoughts that can advance good…

Continue reading

Management-Business Psychology

Working for You Isn’t Working for Me: The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your Boss

Although I write a lot of book reviews, I usually don’t review psychology-related books because their value is so subjective. The things that are most valuable to me as a worker in a non-psychological enterprise aren’t necessarily valuable to everyone else. Thus, I have a hard time ascertaining a psychology-related book’s general worth. However, this book is an exception. Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster offer workplace advice that pertains to almost everyone. They investigate dealing…

Continue reading

Management-Business Software-Technology

Transforming IT Culture: How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors & Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms

I liked this book a lot. It’s labeled as a part of a “CIO Series,” but that’s really a mislabel. It’s for anyone working with software developers who has to navigate a distinct company culture. It’s especially geared for those who want to mold that culture for good. Software development is a tricky industry. Good people are hard to find, and they often don’t have a stereotypical personality – especially if they’re really talented. Yet…

Continue reading

Economics Management-Business Society

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Systems thinking is en vogue these days as we increasingly realize how complex the world really is. Too many manage enterprises based on small rules and adages, but neglect to see how the bigger picture works. Then they are surprised when their interventions end up with a different effect. That’s because the rest of the world works systemically through feedback loops. The small game is not the only relevant factor. Before she died, Dartmouth professor…

Continue reading

Indie Management-Business

Beyond the Office Walls: A Practical Guide for Remote Tech Team Excellence

Remote work has been a trend for a long time as Internet technology inundated homes. Working as a developer in health IT, I have often troubleshot issues from home via my laptop for over a decade. Writing software, I’ve interacted with people all over the globe from my kitchen table or personal office for a long time. The recent COVID pandemic forced the wider workplace to catch up with these trends. As the health threat…

Continue reading

Leadership Management-Business Software-Technology

Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

Engineering management books can sometimes be a bit technical, like the field of engineering itself. Of course, it’s no surprise that engineers often view the task as one of exacting competence – like their work. Yet management can, in truth, be its own thing because it deals with people. Humans pose their own set of challenges, and few can speak authoritatively about both realms. Thus, few good books exist in this domain. Unfortunately, many engineers…

Continue reading

Management-Business Software-Technology

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

Engineering presents unique challenges to managers. Not only are engineering managers usually picked from those who work primarily with objects, but they also receive little training in the discipline. Having little training reinforces a dynamic where little training material is also available to the next generation. To fill this void, Will Larson provides a succinct introduction to the field. His perspective aims to inform from a systems perspective – that is, by observing how managerial…

Continue reading

Management-Business Software-Technology

The Software Hiring Handbook: The Software Developer’s Guide to Conducting a Job Interview

As Michael Kahn states in this book’s introduction, there exist many guides to giving interviews generally along with guides to being interviewed about software development, but there are few guides to giving interviews specifically to developers. This 2006 book tries to fill that niche. It is short and certainly not comprehensive – as if that were even possible. But it advances wisdom that people like me need in finding a software developer, especially for the…

Continue reading

Management-Business

The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work & the Hard Choices We All Face

The COVID pandemic continues to shape the face of the global workforce in 2024. This book, written in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, sought to bring prior research about remote work to the forefront of business leaders. Written by a Wharton School professor, it briefly summarizes earlier studies and speculates on the pandemic’s future business outcomes. Given that it was written in the middle of a global crisis, this work is tightly coupled…

Continue reading