book

Managing Humans

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Some books have this capacity to change how you see things and literally change you. This is on of these books

Managing Humans

It is a series of small chapters / stories of an experienced manager and has made a nice collection of personal learnings and battles and summed them up for our pleasure. Some chapters are hilarious so there will be some fun time involved.

You can expect a wide range of topics which will be about

  • how to manage and live meetings
  • how to interact with people, what are the agendas of people
  • how to see and tackle corporate dramas
  • and so much more

If you’re into management books take a peek. It’s definitely a good read.

tip: make sure you buy the last edition

Team topologies

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This book talks about how to design teams inside an organisation. This is a very important topic because of Conways law:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.


— Melvin E. Conway

This means that when you design an architecture of a system or when you design a platform you better take into account the communication flows of the company and people involved. The team structure will be an imprint for your product architecture.

This book will give you options on how to structure teams. There are several ways defined in the book, ranging from a collaborative team to platform teams serving self service products. A must read before attempting to scale any teams or organisation!

More info on the team topologies website

The DevOps Handbook

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If you are on a DevOps transformation journey this is not doubt a good a read. It will give you the strength and some material to share with your coworkers.

The book remains quite high level (not too deep in the technologies) so it will give you an overview of DevOps practices and why they’re so powerful.
I would recommend the read to engineers but also to managers that want to understand or rollout DevOps practices to improve organisations.
This is also about creating a better workplace for you and your coworkers.

Book: Fake Work

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fake work book

 

This book is really nice. It describes how many people do work that is not actually useful to anyone. People are actually quite smart, even if they are not 100% aware that they are doing fake work they somehow feel it.

Almost nobody wants to do fake work, it is not gratifying that’s why many companies have big turnovers in job positions. The book gives insight and helps defining a strategy to get rid of the wasted time that we spend every day on fake work.

I advise it to anyone, it’s a good read for leaders that want to shape the environments and the culture they live in, and workers that have their part of responsibility in creating the same environment.

My Aikido master told me once: I’ve not created the dojo, everyone each of you has.