Overall: 8/10

I initially breezed through this book in a week thinking it mostly contained nice stories and glib niceties. However going back to 

write the Book Notes took 3 weeks, I found myself scribbling down page upon page compared to my usual amount of notes. Upon reflection, it was a really good book with lots of good points and anecdotal stories to help remember them. If Bill was getting this many “easy” parts right, I can see how the overall impact would have been large.

My main take-away: Team First – A company is formed from teams, get the right people, built an envelope of trust, support and love them.

Actions:

• Improve work roadmap meetings. Given we have the whole team present, anything but very effective use of that time is a waste.
• Re-read project aristotle
• Think about what makes a good meeting
• Always set a measurable goal, sometimes a Big-Hairy-Goal to stretch people

Book Notes:

1. Caddie and CEO
2. Title makes you a Manager, your people make you a leader.
3. Built an envelope of trust
4. Team first
5. The power of love
6. The yardstick

• Caddie and CEO
  • background and some hero-worshiping
  • Teams are building block of a company, not individuals.
  • pg26 Raises interesting possibility of coaches for managers.
    Given the leverage, why are there not coaches providing real-time feedback
  • Mentor vs coach
• Title makes you a Manager, your people make you a leader.
  • A managers authority emerges as they establish credibility with subordinates, peers and superiors.
  • “It’s the people” – Support = Respect + Trust
    • Support = tools, info, roadmap, training
    • Respect = Career goals / Life choices
    • Trust = Autonomy and Decision Making
  • Lying in bed at night, the CEO should worry most about his staff
  • One to ones and staff meeting are critical.
  • Trip Reports – Having one person tell a personal story of their weekend at a Monday meeeting
  • Decision Making – “Making the right decision is important
    Just as important is getting the whole team there.”
  • Managers job to run decision making process, ensure voices heard, cut tie-breaks when stuck and to remind everyone of purpose and root truths.
• Built an envelope of trust
  • The first thing some managers focus on is building a product or getting people working. The priority should be to build trust.
  • Bill saw the world as a network of people with different skills,
    learning to trust each other as a primary mechanism of achieving goals.
  • Psychological Safety – The ability for a team member to voice crazy ideas and feel safe from negative repercussions has been found to be critical to success.
  • Coach the coachable – pg86 “A coach is someone that tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you can be.”
  • Honest, humility, perseverance and constant openness to learning.
  • Leadership is about service to something that is bigger than you.
  • Practice active-listening
  • Diane Greene – “When I’m really annoyed or frustrated with what someone is doing, I step back to think about what they are doing well and what their value is”
  • No gap between statements and facts. Give feedback close to the time, in public if good, in private if negative. Always give it from a place of love.
• Team first
  • Work the team, then the problem.
    When faced with aproblem or opportunity, the first step is to ensure the right team is in place and working on it.
  • Pick the right players. The ability to learn fast, a willingness to work hard, integrity, grit, empathy, and a team first attitude.
  • Bill saw peer relationships as critical and instituted a regular survey amongst peers at google to asses performance at job/relationships/meetings/leadership/innovation.
  • Winning depends on having the best team and the best teams have more women.
  • Identify the biggest problem, the elephant in the room, bring it front and centre and tackle it first.
  • Listen, Observe and fill the communications gaps
• The power of love
  • Get to know and care for people as individuals
  • Cheer people and their successes

Overall 5/10 – Having read and loved the phoenix project, I had high expectations for this book, perhaps too high. It felt like the same message and story regurgitated to sell another book. Perhaps if I hadn’t seen most the ideas before elsewhere it would have felt newer and more impactful.

Book Notes:

• Compared to the previous book there is a lot more emphasis on people skills,
  it’s great to see this highlighted in a book for programmers where that kind of networking isn’t as common.
  Examples:
  • The “rebellion” team was formed as a ragtag coalition of people that wanted to make a difference
  • Kurt operated at the edge of permitted staff behaviour to get the resources the team needed
  • Maxine visited people outside her own department in person to build alliances
  • She asked how they completed their work and helped them find where they fitted into the overall flow to increase throughput overall
  • Sarahs toxic behaviour and the need for psychological safety
• Some problems seem highly exaggerated to reach foregone conclusions to point at fashionable technology.
  • For example getting a working build takes weeks = containers.
  • Concurrency issue = Immutability and Functional programming solves the day
  • I wouldn’t disagree that those technologies are great for some problems, it just seemed they were thrown into the book to namedrop.
• Near the very end it proposes that large companies can outpace their smaller rivals as they have the relationships, resources and data.
  I’m not sure I entirely buy that. One of the hardest things to change is values and perceptions.
• Project Shamu sounded interesting, taking 23 API calls that have their own SLAs and reducing them to one dependency without caching. I wondered what technology this was referring to but googling didn’t help. Any ideas?

The Five Ideals

These are the ideals presented at the back of the book. I can certainly agree on their importance:

1. Locality and Simplicity
2. Focus, Flow and Joy
3. Improvement of Daily Work
4. Psychological Safety
5. Customer Focus

Overall 10/10. A short concise book with a number of good ideas that anyone working in a large/medium or perhaps even a small company would benefit from. So good, that I re-read parts of it twice already.

Book Notes:

Andy uses the analogy of making a breakfast to show how process->assemble->test is a common workflow at any scale. For me many of his points in manufacturing paralleled topics from lean/agile software development.

Inspection Methods:
– In-process inspection e.g. theremometer for boiling eggs
– Receiving inspection e.g. Inspecting eggs on delivery, parallel in software: validating user requirements
Each step takes time/effort and ads value, best to eliminate waste at the earliest stage.

Picking Good Indicators: Indicators chosen dictate our direction.
– Pairing Indicators – prevent overfitting e.g. From scrum points done with busines value delived. Quantitive and qualitive often pair well.
– black-box = Just measure in/output
– Cut a hole in the box to get leading indicators. Can look at a linear indicator (graph) or a stagger chart to ensure going at correct speed or to allow estimation.

Controlling Future Output -Goal should be to keep inventory at earliest, lowest cost stage.
1. Build to order
2. Build to forecast

Assuring Quality
– Act as a gate – Inspect everything, push back rejects
– Monitoring Step – Inspect some, stop line on problems
Variable Inspection Best – Too regular = expected, too few = gaps, no problems = inspect less, problems = inspect more, dive into one at random.
I thought some of this may be very applicable to software, consider for example Pull Reviews or User Stories or Releases, how often should senior developers ensure requirements have been gathered adequately, that jiras are well written, or inspect juniors code. Though on that last point of managing people Andy very much suggests focussing on TRM – Task Relevant Maturity,

Misc
Nudges – Most of a managers day is gathering information. After that there are a few direct decisions but often it will be a case of nudges. Gently influencing items in the direction you think best. Note combined with Andys other point that (Managers Output) = (Output of his Org) + (Output of neighbouring Orgs) this nudging of nearby teams can be very powerful for the company overall.

Hybrid Organisations
Organisations come in two extreme forms:
Mission Oriented = Small hedge fund where everyones goal is to make money
Functional Oriented = IT Support within a bank, whos goal is to deliver IT assistance.
The hybrid organisational form is inevitable. The company I think of is when considering these concepts is McDonalds. McDonalds will have a global marketing department ensuring consistency of branding but it will also have regional departments deciding which offers to run. Similarly some resources such as packaging will be produced in a shared department while regional speciailities can be ran at a much lower level. There will always be a conflict between the goals of these different groups but similar to democracy being the least worst form of government, hybrid organisations appear to be the least-worst method of organisation.

A related concept is Dual Reporting – Individuals can be individual contributors within one team e.g. coders but at other times contribute firm-wide as part of standards committees etc. This allows using their skill sets to the fullest.

…One-to-ones, meetings and a number of other topics were also covered in the book.

Key Takeaways for Me

I really like the idea of paired indicators. Once you’ve heard the concept it’s easy to see other teams doing it wrong and only looking at one indicator. e.g. Within large finance firms there are change management or support teams whose job is to ensure stability of all systems, the metric they will almost always look at is outages and their severity. You will typically see a line or bar chart over time reported or perhaps a breakdown by team. A high number of outsages by a particular team can result in their releases being frozen. I would suggest this metric should be weighted against business value delivered. Does it matter if a system crashes badly once a week if it prints money the rest of the time? Compared to say an accounting system that never fails but delivers little additional value.

What work should a manager do? The manager is responsible for overall team delivery. Therefore a manager should work on the highest leverage item. I think Andy is right that training is an extremely high leverage activity given the return over time. Training someone now, will lead to higher quality output later. Higher quality out = less quality checks aer required and staff are happier. The importance of training does however make you wonder about the impact of the rapidly increasing employee turnover in some countries and the increased reluctance of firms to invest in training.

TRM – Task Relevant Maturity. Either someone refuses to work or can’t do the work. Their ability to do the work will depend on their Task Relevant Maturity. When considering how to assign and monitor tasks, the key metric to keep in mind is TRM.

Summary

As I said at the start, a really good book. Some of his ideas I will have to take time to digest and consider how it would change my approach to certain work. Andy even included a todo list for once you’ve finished the book that I have partly completed. The parts of the book that I was more sceptical of, I plan to force myself to consider more fully. Given how knowledgable and accurate Andy was in some areas I have experience of, I shouldn’t dismiss him in the areas that seem to me more dubious.