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High Performance Organizations Reading List

by bfoks on 9/13/21, 7:20 PM with 40 comments

  • by Aeolun on 9/14/21, 12:24 AM

    My problem with reading all of these tomes (and by now I’ve read a few), is that while I appear to be aware of what works for a software team, my management does not, hasn’t read these, or just plain doesn’t care.

    I need a guide on how to teach people that have a vested interest in not acknowledging that there might have been a problem in the first place.

  • by physicsgraph on 9/14/21, 12:11 AM

  • by fungiblecog on 9/14/21, 12:56 AM

    The trouble with all of these great ideas is that while the management/leadership/whatever may claim they want to solve these problems - they actually don’t want these kinds of solutions.

    What they want is to maintain the power structure that got them where they are - and want to remain - at all costs.

    It’s like asking politicians who got elected using the current system to reform it. It ain’t gonna happen.

  • by harshreality on 9/13/21, 10:30 PM

    Everyday Astronaut's walk and talk with Elon Musk where he attempts to explain his management process, starts at 13:30 of part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw&t=13m30s

    Here's a rough summary:

    1. Make requirements less dumb.

    2. Delete part or process steps. If you're not occasionally adding things back (he says 10%) (ideally in improved versions), you're not removing things often enough.

    3. Simplify, optimize, solve. Everyone's trained to jump to this because the educational process requires you to answer a question as posed, when often the question is dumb and shouldn't be dealt with as-stated.

    4. Accelerate process

    5. Automate

    Those tend to blur together at the edges. I'm sure if he formalized this and wrote it down for mass consumption it'd be presented differently, but it's his current mental model.

    Process testing - remove unnecessary in-process testing after production line debugging is done. Obviously there are nuances, he's not saying to do no in-process testing, but rather to remove testing which was intended to reveal information once that's already been collected and addressed. He cautions about false positives from in-process testing, and notes most testing can be done end of line with acceptable results.

    Finally, it's important to understand the context. The part about part/step deletion in particular, when things get added back 10% of the time, is not appropriate for all development processes. That would have to be adjusted a the specific product and market objective.

  • by mu_killnine on 9/13/21, 8:51 PM

    As someone who is literally starting an IT department from scratch, this is a really exciting list for me to dig into. There are old favorites like 'mythical man month' that I'm generally aware of, though never actually read personally, and whole new blogs and videos to sift through. Thanks for this.

  • by CalChris on 9/14/21, 6:06 AM

    I'm surprised Andy Grove's High Output Management wasn't on the list.

  • by loughnane on 9/14/21, 1:25 PM

    I had a suspicion that there was a significant recency bias, so I clicked on the first 19 amazon links and looked at the published dates.

    - 1988 - 1

    - 1999 - 1

    - 2000 - 1

    - 2002 - 1

    - 2005 - 1

    - 2007 - 2

    - 2008 - 1

    - 2012 - 1

    - 2013 - 1

    - 2014 - 2

    - 2015 - 3

    - 2016 - 3

    - 2017 - 1

    I'm also reminded of the the recent post on The Creative World's Bullshit Industrial Complex [0]. There are some gems in here but I can't help but feel like a lot of them are just uninspired remixes of what came before. The list I want to see is of the "great management books". Ones that:

    - had an effect on firms both in the time the book was published and in subsequent business "generations"

    - influenced subsequent works of note.

    - remain relevant to business today

    Where is that list?

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28459533

  • by sandworm101 on 9/14/21, 4:45 AM

    Yup. These are exactly the sort of exec speak that I expect up-and-coming managers read. They aren't exactly fads but nor are they longstanding respected works. Most will probably still be read in a couple years, but very few will survive twenty. Where are the great works that will improve a person's written language? Where are the seminal works on market theory? Where are the histories? My kingdom for an executive who can string together a cohesive paragraph.

  • by aluciani on 9/13/21, 9:11 PM

    Great resource thanks for sharing. Lots of titles and resources that I have never considered. Super useful :)

  • by aktuel on 9/13/21, 11:50 PM

    What a BS parade. You don't become a real person by reading on how to become a real person.