High Output Management


Andrew S. Grove - 1983
    In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance—throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.

Joel on Software


Joel Spolsky - 2004
    For years, Joel Spolsky has done exactly this at www.joelonsoftware.com. Now, for the first time, you can own a collection of the most important essays from his site in one book, with exclusive commentary and new insights from joel.

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time


Titus Winters - 2020
    With this book, you'll get a candid and insightful look at how software is constructed and maintained by some of the world's leading practitioners.Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum K. Wright, software engineers and a technical writer at Google, reframe how software engineering is practiced and taught: from an emphasis on programming to an emphasis on software engineering, which roughly translates to programming over time.You'll learn:Fundamental differences between software engineering and programmingHow an organization effectively manages a living codebase and efficiently responds to inevitable changeWhy culture (and recognizing it) is important, and how processes, practices, and tools come into play

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters


Ryan Singer - 2019
    "This book is a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.Whether you’re a founder, CTO, product manager, designer, or developer, you’re probably here because of some common challenges that all software companies have to face."

Lead With Respect: A Novel of Lean Practice


Michael Ballé - 2014
    Pink, author of TO SELL IS HUMAN and DRIVE "The Ballé books are a great way to get started or to speed up your pace of transformation, personal and organizational." —Jim Womack, Founder of Lean Enterprise Institute In their new business novel Lead With Respect, authors Michael and Freddy Ballé reveal the true power of lean: developing people through a rigorous application of proven tools and methods. And, in the process, creating the only sustainable source of competitive advantage—a culture of continuous improvement. In this engaging and insightful story, CEO Jane Delaney of Southcape Software discovers from her sensei Andy Ward that learning to lead with respect enables her to help people improve every day. “For us, lean is all about challenging yourself and each other to find the right problems, and working hard every day to engage people in solving them,” he says. Lead With Respect’s timely message brings a new understanding of lean. While lean has become essential for companies to compete in today’s global economy, most practitioners see it as a rigorous focus on process to produce higher quality goods and services—a limited understanding that fails to realize the true power of this approach. This new novel by the Ballés, the third in a series that includes Shingo Research Award-winners The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager, breaks new ground by sharing huge amounts of practical information on the most important yet least understood aspect of lean management: how to develop people through a rigorous application of lean tools. You’ll learn: • How to apply Lead With Respect attitudes to the lean tools you are using now so that you develop a truly sustainable lean culture. • What specific steps to follow to make lean leadership behaviors daily habits. • How to manage with respect through the emotion, conflict, tension, and self-doubt that you’ll face during a lean transformation.

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works


Ash Maurya - 2012
    We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google


Scott Galloway - 2017
    Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong. For all that's been written about the Four over the last two decades, no one has captured their power and staggering success as insightfully as Scott Galloway.Instead of buying the myths these compa-nies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions. How did the Four infiltrate our lives so completely that they're almost impossible to avoid (or boycott)? Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? And as they race to become the world's first trillion-dollar company, can anyone chal-lenge them?In the same irreverent style that has made him one of the world's most celebrated business professors, Galloway deconstructs the strategies of the Four that lurk beneath their shiny veneers. He shows how they manipulate the fundamental emotional needs that have driven us since our ancestors lived in caves, at a speed and scope others can't match. And he reveals how you can apply the lessons of their ascent to your own business or career.Whether you want to compete with them, do business with them, or simply live in the world they dominate, you need to understand the Four.

Building a DevOps Culture


Mandi Walls - 2013
    But, as Mandi Walls explains in this Velocity report, DevOps is really about changing company culture—replacing traditional development and operations silos with collaborative teams of people from both camps. The DevOps movement has produced some efficient teams turning out better products faster. The tough part is initiating the change. This report outlines strategies for managers looking to go beyond tools to build a DevOps culture among their technical staff. Topics include: Documenting reasons for changing to DevOps before you commit Defining meaningful and achievable goals Finding a technical leader to be an evangelist, tools and process expert, and shepherd Starting with a non-critical but substantial pilot project Facilitating open communication among developers, QA engineers, marketers, and other professionals Realigning your team’s responsibilities and incentives Learning when to mediate disagreements and conflicts Download this free report and learn how to the DevOps approach can help you create a supportive team environment built on communication, respect, and trust. Mandi Walls is a Senior Consultant with Opscode.

This Is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox


Niklas Modig - 2011
    This-is-Lean

Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT


Stephen Orban - 2018
    It has made countless new businesses possible and presents a massive opportunity for large enterprises to innovate like startups and retire decades of technical debt. But making the most of the cloud requires much more from enterprises than just a technology change. Stephen Orban led Dow Jones’s journey toward digital agility as their CIO and now leads AWS’s Enterprise Strategy function, where he helps leaders from the largest companies in the world transform their businesses. As he demonstrates in this book, enterprises must re-train their people, evolve their processes, and transform their cultures as they move to the cloud. By bringing together his experiences and those of a number of business leaders, Orban shines a light on what works, what doesn’t, and how enterprises can transform themselves using the cloud.

Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems


Sam Newman - 2014
    But developing these systems brings its own set of headaches. With lots of examples and practical advice, this book takes a holistic view of the topics that system architects and administrators must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architectures.Microservice technologies are moving quickly. Author Sam Newman provides you with a firm grounding in the concepts while diving into current solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. You'll follow a fictional company throughout the book to learn how building a microservice architecture affects a single domain.Discover how microservices allow you to align your system design with your organization's goalsLearn options for integrating a service with the rest of your systemTake an incremental approach when splitting monolithic codebasesDeploy individual microservices through continuous integrationExamine the complexities of testing and monitoring distributed servicesManage security with user-to-service and service-to-service modelsUnderstand the challenges of scaling microservice architectures

Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise


Scott W. Ambler - 2012
    Mainstream agile approaches that are indeed suitable for small projects require significant tailoring for larger, complex enterprise projects. In "Disciplined Agile Delivery," Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines introduce IBM's breakthrough Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, which describes how to do this tailoring. DAD applies a more disciplined approach to agile development by acknowledging and dealing with the realities and complexities of a portfolio of interdependent program initiatives. Ambler and Lines show how to extend Scrum with supplementary agile and lean strategies from Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Unified Process (UP), and other proven methods to provide a hybrid approach that is adaptable to your organization's unique needs. They candidly describe what practices work best, why they work, what the trade-offs are, and when to consider alternatives, all within the context of your situation. "Disciplined Agile Delivery "addresses agile practices across the entire lifecycle, from requirements, architecture, and development to delivery and governance. The authors show how these best-practice techniques fit together in an end-to-end process for successfully delivering large, complex systems--from project initiation through delivery. Coverage includesScaling agile for mission-critical enterprise endeavorsAvoiding mistakes that drive poorly run agile projects to chaosEffectively initiating an agile projectTransitioning as an individual to agileIncrementally building consumable solutionsDeploying agile solutions into complex production environmentsLeveraging DevOps, architecture, and other enterprise disciplinesAdapting your governance strategy for agile projects Based on facts, research, and extensive experience, this book will be an indispensable resource for every enterprise software leader and practitioner--whether they're seeking to optimize their existing agile/Scrum process or improve the agility of an iterative process.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness


Frederic Laloux - 2014
    Deep inside, we sense that more is possible. We long for soulful workplaces, for authenticity, community, passion, and purpose.In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time, in the past, when humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has achieved extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals?A few pioneers have already cracked the code and they show us, in practical detail, how it can be done. Leaders, founders, coaches, and consultants will find this work a joyful handbook, full of insights, examples, and inspiring stories.ADVANCE PRAISE"Congratulations on a spectacular treatise! This is truly pioneering work. In terms of integral sophistication, there is simply nothing like it out there."--Ken Wilber, from the Foreword"The most exciting book I've read in years on organization design and leadership models."--Jenny Wade, Ph.D., Author of Changes of Mind"A book like Reinventing Organizations only comes along once in a decade. Sweeping and brilliant in scope, it is the Good To Great for a more enlightened age. What it reveals about the organizational model of the future is exhilarating and deeply hopeful."--Norman Wolfe, Author of The Living Organization"A comprehensive, highly practical account of the emergent worldview in business. Everything you need to know about building a new paradigm organization!"--Richard Barrett, Chairman and Founder, Barrett Values Center"Frederic Laloux has done business people and professionals everywhere a signal service. He has discovered a better future for organizations by describing, in useful detail, the unusual best practices of today."--Bill Torbert, Author of Action Inquiry"As the rate of change escalates exponentially, the old ways of organizing and educating, which were designed for efficiency and repetition, are dying. Frederic Laloux is one of the few management leaders exploring what comes next. It's deeply different."--Bill Drayton, Founder, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Designing Data-Intensive Applications


Martin Kleppmann - 2015
    Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application


37 Signals - 2006
    At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.