I have a bad habit of reading to deal with anxiety so when I became a manager late last year I read like 13 management books in 6 weeks to prepare/sooth myself. This is a space for me to share the notes I took, I’m slowly transferring/rewriting the full set of notes from elsewhere.

The Manager’s Path by Camile Fournier (2017) Rating: 9/10

Highly recommend this books. It discusses the path for technical contributors from IC to managing projects to managing people, all the way up to CTO or VP level. I got something out of reading all the different levels and the new considerations that are required as you go from one level to another. It’s also nice to know that other people with similar questions, like how to manage contributing technical work as your management responsibilities increase. This book is focused on software engineers so there are some things that aren’t directly related to the R& D work that I do. This means that, for example, certain signs of team health (how long builds take, ship frequency, error logs) and the kind of small technical work that Fournier suggests managers maintain through some of the beginning levels of management (bug fixes, simple pair programing) need to be rethought before I can apply them. Still very useful.

Some concrete take aways from the books:

Tech lead vs manager: Fournier stresses that being a tech lead is a set of characteristics that people can take on at any seniority, so that it can be passed from person to person without changing functional job titles.

Skip level one on ones: A tool for more senior leadership to get a better sense of team health in small/medium organizations and which can help with creating 360 performance. reviews. Might be well known to you but this was the first place I found it.

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Block (2015) Rating: 5/10

This book is written by one of Google’s senior HR people and gives an insight into the culture and practices of Google. It’s very rah-rah Google (as you jight expect) and a lot of it feels a bit outdated (there’s a lot of Google+ hype). Probably not worth reading but there are some interesting tidbits.

One is Google’s relentless focus on hiring. There was a period of time where technical stagg were spending 4-10 hours a week on recruiting, at the time of writing it’s still around 2 hours a week on average. It’s by far the biggest people related expense that Google has, they’re laser focused on getting the best people in instead of training the people they have.

The other is the culture of ownership and openness that Google has been able to cultivate. It does sometimes go too far (there’s a story in the book about a ~1300 response email thread about the name of a pie), but it is impressive none the less.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fuessell (2015) Rating:7/10

This book describes how the Joint Special Operations Task Force has to change its management style while fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq in the early 2000s. Basically Al Qaeda was high decentralized and was able to outmaneuver the Task Force. The Task Force had to move towards decentralization to adequately deal with the treat.

Two interesting things:

  1. This is a book that’s ultimately about addressing the increased complexity of an interconnected world. For those that are familiar with Agile software development or have read the Scrum books (cause you’re a process nerd like I am), it has a similar feel. They ended up doing what was essentially a daily stand up meeting to handle the complexity of the task, though in this case the meeting would run up to 2 hours and had up to 7000 people on the line.
  2. The end result was a surprisingly similar to the culture that was advocated in Work Rules!. The Task Force landed on two principles: “shared consciousness” and “empowered execution.” Basically everyone was given access to information and the overall strategy and they were empowered to execute on their understanding of the situation. This is in contrast to the situation before where the top person would have to woken up in the middle of the night to give a yes/no, even when that yes/no was based exclusively on the information and judgement of a junior officer.

Scaling People: Techniques for Management and Company Building by Clair Hughes Johnson (2023) Rating: 8/10

This book is by a senior people leader from Google and then Stripe, and contains a ton of good information on how to approach all aspects of people management. It’s very dense, 500 pages of HR-y templates, so it’s meant more as a reference and shouldn’t be read through (like I did).