- Peter Drucker - The Effective Executive
- Andy Grove - High Output Management
- Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month
- Marty Cagan - Inspired
- Dale Carnegie - How to win friends and influence people
- Jocko Willink - The Dichotomy of Leadership
I would also recommend The Goal by Eliyahu M Goldratt as an excellent primer on the Theory of Constraints as an effective management philosophy.
Most people recommend The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and other books in that ilk, but I've found far more value in these three books alone than every other management theory book I've read, combined.
"Workplace Management" - Taiichi Ohno
"Lean Six Sigma" - Jeffrey Ries
But aside from these "management philosophies", there's also standard industry/role practices that companies don't require their employees to implement, and when they do it's only enough to say they technically did it. Often the employees don't even know the standards exist. It's embarrassing.
Agreed; my example would be all the basic things in "High Output Management" — especially the performance management pieces.
What'd you have in mind?
- Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders (pushes a team-first approach that I think supports and reinforces the core concepts of agile )
And if you go and read some old management cybernetics you see all that stuff back in the fucking 60s, 80 years ago. I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head tho
Not really. It's a handful of common-sense techniques around communication, architecture, and getting out of people's way. There's 3-5 books that compress most of the necessary knowledge into straightforwardly readable form.
Of course, most people haven't read them. Instead, as an industry, we've converged on having engineering companies led by non-engineers, "scrum masters" galore, and desperate cargo-culting of OKRs instead of having real objectives and real key results. "Top" teams at FAANG companies are routinely having 1980s-style conversations about "staffing projects" while they reassure each other that they don't need to prioritize because "everything is important." (Ask me how I know...)
It's all self-inflicted. I don't know about your extrapolation to broader politics, but back here in the office? The simple task of organizing 5, 10, 50, maybe even up to 100 people? That part is perfectly doable without making any major mistakes. We just don't want to do it.
At minimum, though, I wish we'd stop sitting around and saying it's too hard. Here's Ben Horowitz, writing in 2011 (twelve years ago!) [1] about it:
> If you manage a team of 10 people, it’s quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible.
If we as an industry could hold the bar higher on running companies/teams when they were this small size, personally I think a lot of things would naturally sort themselves out at the 1,000+ person size. Besides, change begins at home — even just improving the running of your local team would go a long way. Then, even if the executives are flailing around with their latest harebrained take on why they don't need to write rigorous OKRs, at least your team is good.
I'm not claiming it's trivial, but I wish we'd stop making it sound like some sort of mind-blowing skill of living on the knife's edge. Leading a group of a dozen engineers is a perfectly straightforward and learnable skill. And it doesn't "take just one member... to make it all fall apart," because you can just fire that one member.
(Sorry for the morning rant. I know you meant well, and you're also right to empathize with each person's individual needs. It's certainly a difficult job... it's just not impossibly difficult.)
[1]: https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-ski...