The Book Series - Management 3.0

* Management 1.0 is traditional top-down decision-making.

* Management 2.0 improves upon traditional management with agile principles adoption and continuous improvement.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the summary I never remember when I think of this book. 

I love this book. Jurgen Appelo is a great speaker and a greater writer. He is characteristically blunt. One of the chapters goes along the lines of: a manager delegates to his team members is not an art of altruism, he does it so that he has the time to do things he wants to - and proceed to retreat to his ivory tower. , Though he probably would prefer "Dutch frankness" instead. He tells jokes with an emotionless straight face. My kind of joke.

Management 3.0 laid out a complete framework to revamp leadership. There were 5-6 principles built around some other theories, like complexity, game, and network. There is more to that half-ass summary, the details are just a Google away if you are interested. What makes this book unique to me is actually the discussion of management theories before diving into good/bad practices. Each principle is split into two chapters, one on the theory and the other on the execution. Other works in this genre tend to be more dogmatic if I could say so.

 

I am no expert in complexity science. There is a non-zero chance all this theory inclusion is pseudo-science. But I like the attempt and pseudo or not, there is a framework to cling to when in doubt. And there will be a lot of doubts. Management-books-praise-human-ability-to-self-organize-but-that-doesn't-seem-to-cover-my-staff-inertia-to-stay-put kind of doubt. To be frank, the stark contrast between fiction and non-fiction typically comes with management literature exists here as well. There is no unicorn.

Management 3.0 since its debut a decade ago has exploded in popularity though. There are training courses, consultant programs, and god damned certifications. It is going down the dark commercial beaten path all so well-known Agile has trodden before. And that dented my heart a bit. But hey one can only retreat to his ivory tower with a fat bank account.

I still think you should give it a try though.

The Book Series - An Elegant Puzzle

Great books are rare in an age where everyone and their dog can publish. An elegant puzzle is such a gem. The book is a collection of blog posts from Will Larson about the career of an engineering manager. The engineering manager position is the first-level manager-of-managers in a tech organization. And from my personal experience, it was also the level where all the skills that got me there became useless. I was left to my own intuition and good old trials and errors in my first few years on the job, with little mentorship because it was a startup. In Vietnamese, there is a saying that "Failure is the mother of Success". And though I have had some limited successes over the years, I didn't, and still don't, want to meet many of their mothers. No joke intended obviously.

The book was out in 2019 and I only learned about its existence this year, 2024. Halfway through the book, it had already won my acclaim. Had I known some of the topics in it back when it was published, I would have avoided mistakes that still haunt me to this day.

Without delving into specific examples, some knowledge I find particularly inspiring in this book includes:

• The two most important managerial for an engineer are: making technical migrations cheap, and running clean reorganizations.
• In the event of a reorganization, changing the scope of a team is easier than changing the team members.
• People easily and understandably mistake growth in size for growth in impact and mastery. Growth in size has more to do with a company's growth than individual level.
• Drafting policy is important. Once done, it is crucial to avoid undermining your work, and yourself, with exceptions.

That is to name only a few. Some might sound silly to you. And that's good, you are already better than I was when I started my path. I am still pretty bad at my craft, to be frank. Books like this, they help.

The Book Series - Peopleware

Peopleware is simply an amazing piece of writing that despite its age (published in 1987) still rings true to this date. The message of the book is crystal. When a tech team is put together, it is common to believe they will face and solve primarily technical problems. But before they are developers, architects, or managers, they are people and they will have people problems more often than process or technical ones. The work of a manager is to first and foremost understand these sociological challenges. Agile methodologies, cutting-edge technologies, and whatnot are built on the foundation of people enjoying working with each other. Thinking any differently is akin to building a castle on sand.

Building a team is not a great analogy because building implies a strong level of control over the shape and form of the final delivery. Whereas how a team goes through its formation stages depends much more on its goals, the environment, and the team itself than what any manager gets to say. Creating a team in that sense is much closer to growing a tree. One can be diligent in choosing the right tree for his spot of land, controlling the soil pH, and watering adequately without spoiling the root but much of the actual growing is done by the tree. Similarly, one cannot make a team perform, he can only remove all malicious elements that harm the development of the team, and give the team the time it needs to form its identity and culture. This is essentially the thought model DeMarco and Lister came up with and spent the rest of the book to propagate.

The Mythical Man-Month established that a software project was fundamentally different from a typical manufacturing - "9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month". Peopleware laid out the elements that made a team great and a project successful. Management 3.0 explained how these elements work with the modern understanding of complex systems. There are certainly more profound books that I haven't known, but I think these three books make a great example of standing on the shoulders of giants in management methodology. Over 35 years, management has gone from a myth to a well-studied field.

I came across Peopleware when I was an intern. I was too junior to make any immediate use of the book, but it gave me thoughts. The thoughts made me see that every project was more than just an application of technologies and it took more than professionalism to make people work well together. Thoughts and experiences then became opinions. Today I am quite opinionated when it comes to running a tech company. All because of a little book I picked up in the office some 15 years ago.

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The Book Series is a collection of books that in one way or another affects the person I am today. The books are not necessarily good or popular, though some of them certainly are, they simply came to my life at the right time and left a dent. The books are listed in the order I skim through my bookshelves, which is completely and utterly whimsical.

The Book Series - Ý tưởng này là của chúng mình

 

"Ý Tưởng Này Là Của Chúng Mình" is a Vietnamese book. As far as I can tell, there is no English translation. It's a collection of blog posts from a renowned copywriter about his career. It conveys stories of one who is dedicated to his career. It could have been a heavy topic but in contrast, the book is devoid of all formal language and academic knowledge. It's funny, casual, and vulgar, like listening to a close friend ranting over weekend coffee. That makes it very entertaining and a great testimonial to the author and his craft - you wouldn't want to see a moody ad, would you.

But dude, you are a software engineer, the worst kind of engineer, why do you have anything to do with stories from ad agencies, you ask. Firstly, it is just a really good piece of writing and thoroughly enjoyable. Turn out, there is nothing special about software engineering. Copywriters and the rest of the ad industry seem to have the exact same concerns: you are in because you love what you do, or because it is a trendy career choice; you need both dedication and passion if you want to go far; you have to be conscious of keeping your job from eroding your personal life; etc.

However, those alone would not cut it for this series, because you likely find those empty sayings in just about every self-help book available. But the author makes a good case of show-don't-tell. Paired with his humor, the book, to me, is a giant reminder of the joy of doing the thing you love. Yes, the work you do every day is supposed to be fun. In return, you are supposed to invest in knowledge, health, and time so you can continue doing what you love in the long run. Work can be fun if it is what you love, and you do it right.

P/S I re-read this book from time to time for the sheer entertainment element. I wasn't good enough to write this vividly about the tech scene. I tried. I hope someone better than me will do some day. You should give "Ý Tưởng Này Là Của Chúng Mình" a try. Provided that you know Vietnamese, I don't think you will regret it.

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The Book Series is a collection of books that in one way or another affects the person I am today. The books are not necessarily good or popular, though some of them certainly are, they simply came to my life at the right time and left a dent. The books are listed in the order I skim through my bookshelves, which is completely and utterly whimsical.

The Book Series - The Unwritten Laws Of Business

The book is small, tiny even. You can call it a booklet and still be technically correct. I mean, it is the size of my hand and composed of less than a hundred pages. The title is oxymoron. Now that the book has been published, the laws are no longer unwritten, aren't they? The title should have been just The Laws Of Business. Yet that wouldn't be very faithful to its content.

See, the book is not about doing business. I don't mean it in a rhetorical sense like "Animal Farm is not about either animal or husbandry". No, the book literally didn't bother to state which field of business law it was. For a law book, it is pretty shitty if I am being honest.

Alright alright, I am not fooling around anymore. These unwritten laws are actually a code of workplace conduct that remains as concise, timeless, and practical today as it was 80 years ago. In a calm and refreshingly free of modern business jargon and abbreviations manner, the author described how one should carry himself at work, the importance of a can-do attitude and the ability to get things done, what a professional working relationship with his boss looks like, and in the occasion he becomes a manager, what his duty is.

To the well-adjusted among us, the book could have been just a collection of reasonable common sense rules. But I wasn't one of those. I came across the book when I was finding my way back on track after a total meltdown and being a professional couch potato for 6 months. Something about the book, its language from another age, its no-bullshit precision, its uncanny ability to shed light on my unknown unknown, or perhaps all of them, gave me the mentorship I didn't know I needed in a trying time.

The book's original title back in 1944 was actually The Unwritten Laws Of Engineering. Despite being yet another shitty title - again, not about engineering at all - it is a strong reminder that regardless of our job, the business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines. That, probably, is the unwritten part.

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The Book Series is a collection of books that in one way or another affects the person I am today. The books are not necessarily good or popular, though some of them certainly are, they simply came to my life at the right time and left a dent. The books are listed in the order I skim through my bookshelves, which is completely and utterly whimsical.