Photo by rbieber
Just received my Amazon shipment of The Great American Novel by Keith Malley (host of Keith and the Girl). I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while.
Update:
It looks like the book was released prematurely by Malleys publisher and is no longer available. Apparently the version on sale was not completely edited and the cover was not approved. Full explanation of what happened is available on KATG Episode #711 at around 37:40.
Photo by rbieber
I think I had this whole set as a kid.
Jonna and I hit a local antique store yesterday to kill some time and sitting on a shelf I saw these. I am pretty sure I had every one of this set when I was a kid and would spend hours reading these books.
Its cool to run into something every once in a while that is such a powerful anchor that it literally takes you back to lying in your bunk bed reading “The Twisted Claw”.
While I still have a few books in the queue mainly focused around TPS, I started reading Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, the prequel to The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works.
Not too far into it yet, but riveted again. Pretty amazing story. Highly recommend both books.
I’m really curious about a lot of the ideas in these books, and how they would work in a traditional company. I know I’ve made little adjustments in this direction even before reading the books, but now I’m really curious as to how extreme you can go. Ricardo seems to have had great success going more extreme than most. I admire his idealism and his trust in people.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book on business that has kept me captivated through the whole thing, but Ricardo Semler’s The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works certainly did.
Semler is the CEO of SemCo SA, a company in Brazil with a pretty crazy management model by conventional standards. A complete democracy. People choose where and when they will work. There are no permanent desks, no dress codes, and employees select their own salaries and bonus structures. Most ideas for new business for the company comes directly from its employees. The bottom line, the company is run on the base assumption that their people can be trusted to (and actually are motivated to) do what is needed to keep the business running and growing.
This is, oddly, the complete opposite of the normal viewpoint seen in corporations today that employees are not trustworthy, must be monitored, must be in the office during a certain timeframe and dress a certain way to ensure that they are “behaving professionally” and “productive”.
Semlers philosophy may seem weird to some, but it also seems to work, as according to Semler the company has grown from $4M a year when he took over the company from his father in 1982 to, as of 2003, an annual revenue of $212M. Reading the book, its hard to figure out what SemCo actually does, but the model in which it is run is so intriguing that by the end of the book you don’t really care.
Some of the most interesting assumptions, behaviors, and programs that I found while reading this book that SemCo pioneers:
Its extremely hard to characterize the thoughts contained in this book in a review. They are so different, and so people oriented, that the best thing you can say is once you read this book you will more than likely begin thinking about how to relocate to Brazil to be a part of it. The book is really well written and Semler has a great conversational style to his writing. It isn’t your typical business book, which would be expected being written from someone who is not the typical CEO.
Do yourself a favor and pick this book up. It will completely change the way you look at your employees and your company.
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First day of vacation is today. Last night completed the three audio books that were sitting on my iPod. “How to Win Friends & Influence People” (Dale Carnegie), “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Christopher Hitchens), and “Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit” (Daniel Quinn). All great books.
During time off I’m going to try and finish up the rest (or at least a good part) of my remaining list of half read books, including “The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production– Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry” (James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos).
I really have to start a book and finish it and not order another one until its complete. Its called FLOW Ron.
I also have “The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))” (Scott Berkun) that just got here the other day. It will have to sit in line until I finish up the loose ends.
Last month I posted a quote from Nicolo Machiavelli on change that I had heard in a lecture by Carly Fiorina. I’ve recently picked up the book The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun where he includes the whole quote – which is much more interesting than the subset.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
— Niccolo Machiavelli
Aside from finding this gem, this book is excellent – and has provided so much mental relief for me in its reading. So many people I know talk about innovation like its a thing, rather than a series of ideas, experiments and failures that may lead to something great.
Scott describes innovation in the book like this:
The dirty little secret – the fact often denied – is that unlike the mythical epiphany, real creation is sloppy. Discovery is messy; exploration is dangerous. No one knows what he’s going to get when he is being creative.
To which he follows up with:
Creative work cannot fit neatly into plans, budgets, and schedules. Magellan, Lewis and Clark, and Captain Kirk were all sent on missions into the unknown with clear understanding that they might not return with anything, or even return at all.
This is a perfect book for managers all the way up the chain. It documents everything about the creative field that those in it know, and those who manage people in it have been conditioned to forget. If there is one book you pick up this year, pick this one up, read it, give it to your manager, and have him give it to his manager.
I’m re-reading Persuasion Engineering by Richard Bandler and John LA Valle, after recently taking an “influence and persuasion” training.
I’ve always enjoyed Bandlers work. I saw him speak once and he was entertaining and intense. He is definitely the source of a lot of good quotes on change.
Two of them I hit tonight:
One thing that we learn quickly is a rut.
– Richard Bandler
I really like this one from Virginia Satir:
The will to survive is not the strongest in human beings. The strongest instinct in human beings is to do what is familiar.
– Virginia Satir
I’m on a change kick lately. I think I’m taking a break from everything else, finishing this book, and then hitting “The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which is another book I’ve wanted to reread for a while.
I’m reading The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. It is an extremely interesting book.
I ran into this small paragraph yesterday that for some reason stuck in my head as something important:
The truly lean plant has two key organizational features: It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for detecting defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause.
I’m telling you, the Poppendeick books are great, but there is nothing like going right to the source for an explanation of lean. I’m about 100 pages into the current book and I am absolutely fascinated at how much of todays current corporate structure (multi-level, many people with very specific task sets or responsibilities) is based on things that Ford and Sloan did with their companies.
In IT, this management style is manifested through all the different groups one hears about all the time from people in the field: Development, Infrastructure, Business Analysts, Quality Assurance. Each its own little silo, with its own responsibilities – and never should one group know how to do, or be privy to, the information in one of the other groups. Handoffs occur between the groups via very large documents.
Sometimes it goes further than that. I was talking to a friend once (who worked at another company, BTW) who told me about how their DBA’s were responsible for uptime and performance of the database and had decided that developers were not allowed to use ORDER BY clauses in their SQL because it effected the performance of the database. These developers were actually forced to sort their results within the application, rather than use the capabilities of the database, adding additional complexity to an already complex application. Worse, management seemed to buy into the decision, as I don’t think I would have been hearing about the situation if it was overruled. Ridiculous.
Another quote from the book, same page:
In old fashioned mass production plants, managers jealously guard information about conditions in the plant, thinking this knowledge is the key to their power.
Again, shocking how much of this mentality you read about in corporations not even connected to automobiles. This sounds like just about every company I’ve talked to people about (or worked at) over the years.
I’ve come to the decision over the years that ultimate transparency is the key to breaking down silos. It only breaks down your silo, but hey – thats a start, and at least you are setting an example.
Its definitely very beneficial, I’m finding, to read about things that are completely outside your profession to give you some distance from what is being taught. The lessons flow in easily this way, because you don’t have the predisposition that you “already know how things work”.
I recommend to anyone in IT to pick this book up. Its absolutely fascinating.
I have about three books that I am reading on and off but have been unable to focus on any of them for any length of time. Tom The Architect mentioned a book to me a few months ago called Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications by Cal Henderson, engineering manager for the Flickr photo service, a service that I have used extensively since being turned on to it by, you guessed it, Tom The Architect.
This was the first book in a long time that I couldn’t put down, mainly because everything in the book is geared towards teaching you about how to create really, really, big web sites and the issues involved in scaling them. It was also quite intriguing because the book covers tools you use all of the time, like PHP and MySQL that are hard to find really good books about how they scale.
Cal covers a lot of material in this book, from layering your web application architecture, to creating an environment for developers to work in, which includes source control, issue tracking, coding standards and the like. This section was quite encouraging to me, as we have implemented almost everything that Cal mentions in the book (sometimes its nice to get some external validation). Cal then goes on to talk about internationalization and localization, data integrity and security, using email as an alternate entrance into your application, and how to build remote services.
All of this was great, but the next few chapters I found really valuable. Cal talks about identifying bottlenecks in your web application, scaling applications such as MySQL (where he covers quite a few replication strategies) and scaling storage. He also covers measurements, statistics and monitoring. Finally, Cal talks about adding API’s into your application to support mobile applications, web services, etc.
Cal references quite a few tools that are freely available in these discussions – tools that I didn’t even know were out there, that you can use to simplify your monitoring environment. I was most intrigued with the Spread Toolkit, a self described “a unified message bus for distributed applications” that allows you to unify logging across your applications. Anyone who has tried to debug an issue on a site that has more than one box would appreciate knowing about this tool.
This is the first book that I’ve read in a long time, technology wise, that hit the sweet spot between talking about real issues that I have been facing and possible solutions. I highly recommend grabbing this book and in the very least just keeping it on your book shelf for future reference. This is one thats going to be a constant companion for me in the coming months.
One of my favorite “bad” movies that I just cannot switch past when its on is the movie “Road House“. As a matter of fact, we went out and bought the DVD so that when it is on TV, I can pop in the DVD and watch the “unedited” TV version of the movie – thats how addictive the movie is to me for some reason. I just cannot “not” watch it when its on.
So imagine my surprise when the latest episode of Manager Tools used Roadhouse as one of their examples when discussing Handling Peer Conflict When Your Directs Are Involved. The example was around one of their steps in handling conflict, which was “Turn the other cheek”. In the movie, there is a scene in which Patrick Swayze is laying down the rules for working in the bar now that he has been hired as a cooler. Oddly, the scene really does illustrate the point Mark was making quite well:
DALTON:
1. Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.
2. Take it outside. Never start anything in the bar unless its absolutely necessary.
and3. Be nice.
EMPLOYEE:
C’monDALTON:
If someone gets in your face and calls you a <bleep>, I want you to be nice.EMPLOYEE: OK …
DALTON: Ask him to walk, but be nice. If he won’t walk – walk him – but be nice. If you can’t walk him, one of the others will help you – and you’ll both be nice. I want you to remember that its a job. Its nothing personal.
EMPLOYEE 2: Uh, huh. Being called a <bleep> isn’t personal?
DALTON: No. Its two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
EMPLOYEE 2: [laughs] Well what if someone calls my mama a whore?
DALTON: Is she? [pause with employee laughter] I want you to be nice until its time to not be nice.
EMPLOYEE 3: Well, uh, how are we supposed to know when that is?
DALTON: You won’t. I’ll let you know. You are the bouncers, I am the cooler. All you have to do is watch my back – and each others … and take out the trash.
See video below.
I guess it just goes to show you that there are leadership lessons everywhere, you just have to be looking for them. Road House, honestly, would have been the last place I would have looked, but damned if they aren’t there as well.
As an aside, I’ve just started reading a book called Leadership Sopranos Style: How to Become a More Effective Boss. Again, another place I would not necessarily look for leadership lessons. The book is pretty good so far. I’ll probably write something up on it when I finish it.
I like books and lectures that use pop culture to make the concepts more accessible. We need more of this in the world, rather than the dry theory of most leadership related material.
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