Book picks similar to
Adventures of an IT Leader by Robert D. Austin
business
leadership
technology
management
Startup CEO: How to Build a Company to Success
Matt Blumberg - 2013
Author Matt Blumberg, a technology and marketing entrepreneur, knows this all too well. Back in 1999, he started a company called Return Path, which later became the driving force behind the creation of his blog, OnlyOnce--because "you're only a first time CEO once."Now, more than a decade later, he's written "Startup CEO." As the fifth book in the "StartUp Revolution" series, this reliable resource is based on Blumberg's experience as a startup CEO and covers a number of issues he's faced over the dozen years he's been a CEO.Offers valuable insights into how the CEO sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholdersDiscusses how to build a company's human capital by recruiting, hiring, and retaining the very best talentExamines how a CEO must align available resources with the company's strategy in order to ensure successAddresses what it takes to master the "How" of being a CEO--from leading an executive team to managing in any type of marketEngaging and informative, this book is essential reading for any, and every, CEO.
R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data
Hadley Wickham - 2016
This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible.
Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You’ll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned along the way.
You’ll learn how to:
Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysis
Program—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and ease
Explore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test them
Model—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your dataset
Communicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and results
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Jake Knapp - 2016
And now there’s a sure-fire way to solve their problems and test solutions: the sprint.While working at Google, designer Jake Knapp created a unique problem-solving method that he coined a “design sprint”—a five-day process to help companies answer crucial questions. His ‘sprints’ were used on everything from Google Search to Chrome to Google X. When he moved to Google Ventures, he joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky, both designers and partners there who worked on products like YouTube and Gmail. Together Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz have run over 100 sprints with their portfolio companies. They’ve seen firsthand how sprints can overcome challenges in all kinds of companies: healthcare, fitness, finance, retailers, and more.A practical guide to answering business questions, Sprint is a book for groups of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.
The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace: Empowering Organizations by Encouraging People
Gary Chapman - 2011
This book helps supervisors and managers effectively communicate appreciation and encouragement to their employees, resulting in higher levels of job satisfaction, healthier relationships between managers and employees, and decreased cases of burnout. Ideal for both the profit and non-profit sectors, the principles presented in this book have a proven history of success in businesses, schools, medical offices, churches, and industry. Each book contains an access code for the reader to take a comprehensive online MBA Inventory (Motivating By Appreciation) - a $20 value.The inventory is designed to provide a clearer picture of an individual's primary language of appreciation and motivation as experienced in a work-related setting. It identifies individuals' preference in the languages of appreciation. Understanding an individual's primary and secondary languages of appreciation can assist managers and supervisors in communicating effectively to their team members.
Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
Howard Schultz - 2007
Concerned that Starbucks had lost its way, Schultz was determined to help it return to its core values and restore not only its financial health, but also its soul. In Onward, he shares the remarkable story of his return and the company's ongoing transformation under his leadership, revealing how, during one of the most tumultuous economic times in history, Starbucks again achieved profitability and sustainability without sacrificing humanity. Offering readers a snapshot of a moment in history that left no company unscathed, the book zooms in to show, in riveting detail, how one company struggled and recreated itself in the midst of it all. The fastpaced narrative is driven by day-to-day tension as conflicts arise and lets readers into Schultz's psyche as he comes to terms with his limitations and evolving leadership style. Onward is a compelling, candid narrative documenting the maturing of a brand as well as a businessman.Onward represents Schultz's central leadership philosophy: It's not just about winning, but the right way to win. Ultimately, he gives readers what he strives to deliver every day - sense of hope that, no matter how tough times get, the future can be just as or more successful than the past, whatever one defines success to be.
The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers
Gillian Tett - 2014
This organizational structure results in both limited information and restricted thinking. The Silo Effect asks these basic questions: why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious? Why, as psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it, are we sometimes so “blind to our own blindness”?Gillian Tett, journalist and senior editor for the Financial Times, answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different tales of the silo syndrome, spanning Bloomberg’s City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, UBS bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, and the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and individuals can master their silos instead. These are stories of failure and success.From ideas about how to organize office spaces and lead teams of people with disparate expertise, Tett lays bare the silo effect and explains how people organize themselves, interact with each other, and imagine the world can take hold of an organization and lead from institutional blindness to 20/20 vision.
Non-Invasive Data Governance: The Path of Least Resistance and Greatest Success
Robert Seiner - 2014
Data Governance should not be about command-and-control, yet at times could become invasive or threatening to the work, people and culture of an organization. Non-Invasive Data Governance™ focuses on formalizing existing accountability for the management of data and improving formal communications, protection, and quality efforts through effective stewarding of data resources. Non-Invasive Data Governance will provide you with a complete set of tools to help you deliver a successful data governance program. Learn how:
Steward responsibilities can be identified and recognized, formalized, and engaged according to their existing responsibility rather than being assigned or handed to people as more work.
Governance of information can be applied to existing policies, standard operating procedures, practices, and methodologies, rather than being introduced or emphasized as new processes or methods.
Governance of information can support all data integration, risk management, business intelligence and master data management activities rather than imposing inconsistent rigor to these initiatives.
A practical and non-threatening approach can be applied to governing information and promoting stewardship of data as a cross-organization asset.
Best practices and key concepts of this non-threatening approach can be communicated effectively to leverage strengths and address opportunities to improve.
Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
Christopher Steiner - 2012
It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills—and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These “bots” started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected. In this fascinating, frightening book, Christopher Steiner tells the story of how algorithms took over—and shows why the “bot revolution” is about to spill into every aspect of our lives, often silently, without our knowledge. The May 2010 “Flash Crash” exposed Wall Street’s reliance on trading bots to the tune of a 998-point market drop and $1 trillion in vanished market value. But that was just the beginning. In Automate This, we meet bots that are driving cars, penning haiku, and writing music mistaken for Bach’s. They listen in on our customer service calls and figure out what Iran would do in the event of a nuclear standoff. There are algorithms that can pick out the most cohesive crew of astronauts for a space mission or identify the next Jeremy Lin. Some can even ingest statistics from baseball games and spit out pitch-perfect sports journalism indistinguishable from that produced by humans. The interaction of man and machine can make our lives easier. But what will the world look like when algorithms control our hospitals, our roads, our culture, and our national security? What happens to businesses when we automate judgment and eliminate human instinct? And what role will be left for doctors, lawyers, writers, truck drivers, and many others? Who knows—maybe there’s a bot learning to do your job this minute.
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
Esther Derby - 2006
The tools and recipes in this book will help you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology, your methodology, and those difficult "people" issues on your team.Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as "post-mortems") are only helpful at the end of the project--too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today.Now, Derby and Larsen show you the tools, tricks, and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You'll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes, and how to scale these techniques up. You'll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project--not just at the end.With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.ContentsForwardPrefaceIntroduction1. Helping your team inspect and adapt2. A retrospective custom-fit for your team3. Leading retrospectives4. Activities to set the stage5. Activities to gather data6. Activities to gather insights7. Activities to decide what to do8. Activities to close the retrospective9. Releases and project retrospectives10. Make it soA1. Facilitation suppliesA2. Debriefing activitiesA3. Activities quick reference matrixA4. Resources for learning facilitation skillsA5. Bibliography
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
HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites
Jon Duckett - 2011
Joining the professional web designers and programmers are new audiences who need to know a little bit of code at work (update a content management system or e-commerce store) and those who want to make their personal blogs more attractive. Many books teaching HTML and CSS are dry and only written for those who want to become programmers, which is why this book takes an entirely new approach. • Introduces HTML and CSS in a way that makes them accessible to everyone—hobbyists, students, and professionals—and it’s full-color throughout • Utilizes information graphics and lifestyle photography to explain the topics in a simple way that is engaging • Boasts a unique structure that allows you to progress through the chapters from beginning to end or just dip into topics of particular interest at your leisureThis educational book is one that you will enjoy picking up, reading, then referring back to. It will make you wish other technical topics were presented in such a simple, attractive and engaging way!
Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
Andy OramLincoln Stein - 2007
You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes.This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.
Hacker's Delight
Henry S. Warren Jr. - 2002
Aiming to tell the dark secrets of computer arithmetic, this title is suitable for library developers, compiler writers, and lovers of elegant hacks.
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Jesse Schell - 2008
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality video games. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses—one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer—and will understand how to do it.
Leadership in Organizations
Gary A. Yukl - 1981
This text provides a balance of theory and practice as it surveys the major theories and research on leadership and managerial effectiveness in formal organizations. Changes in the Seventh Edition include a reorganization of chapters to make room for additional material while maintaining the unique structure that addresses both academics and practitioners. The text now covers ethical, spiritual, servant, and authentic leadership and discusses diversity in leadership roles.