Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions of complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies. Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle orients around the particular challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams to technical debt to succession planning--and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

    Now, they build on their message with a bold, iconoclastic strategy for creating the ideal company culture—what they call "the calm company." Their approach directly attack the chaos, anxiety, and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and hampers billions of workers every day.Long hours, an excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for modern professionals. But it should be a mark of stupidity, the authors argue. Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for large organizations—individuals, contractors, and solopreneurs are burning themselves out the same way. The answer to better productivity isn’t more hours—it’s less waste and fewer things that induce distraction and persistent stress.It’s time to stop celebrating Crazy, and start celebrating Calm, Fried and Hansson assert.Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. "Calm" has been the cornerstone of their company’s culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn’t a book telling you what to do. It’s a book showing you what they’ve done—and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

    This book presents guidance on how to set-up, organise, control, and deliver projects on time, within budget and to the right quality. It is applicable to projects in both IT and non-IT environments.

    Using a simple step-by-step approach, the book is the perfect introduction to project management tools, techniques, and concepts. Readers will learn how to: - Develop a mission statement, vision, goals, and objectives - Plan the project - Create the work breakdown structure - Produce a workable schedule - Understand earned value analysis - Manage a project team - Control and evaluate progress at every stage. Fully updated based on the latest version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK(R)), the fourth edition contains new information and expanded coverage on the project risk plan; the change control process; the concept of the project manager as leader; and more. This up-to-the-minute guide is filled with tips and techniques for planning and executing projects on time, on budget, and with maximum efficiency.

    For centuries, we have learned what's not taught through our own experiences and the stories of others. Even today, only 3 per cent of leadership development occurs due to classroom training and coursework. In fact, for most managers, the penny drops only when we are at the end of our careers. R. Gopalakrishnan, author of the best-selling The Case of the Bonsai Manager, has many stories to tell. With forty-three years corporate experience across countries, each story recounted here has taught him a valuable lesson in some intuitive way. Each one is narrated here for you to allow you to reflect and learn for yourself how to improve and develop. Using the framework of the Tata Management Training Centre (TMTC) and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), Gopalakrishnan explores: The three worlds of the manager—the inner world, the world of relationships and the world of getting things done. *The importance of emotional quotient (EQ) to progress as well as intelligence to get ahead in your career. *The deadly personal qualities of bonsai-trapped leaders. *The deadly traps for organizations. When the Penny Drops: Learning What's Not Taught encourages you to reflect on yourself. It will help you learn by identifying the success mantras embedded in you and releasing the lessons that might be entrapped within yourself.

    People need to be effective.Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the right time. Recognizing why we do the things we do. Understanding the impact of our actions. Creating value - not just product. For ourselves, our families, our friends, our co-workers. For our legacy.Personal Kanban takes the same Lean principles from manufacturing that led the Japanese auto industry to become a global leader in quality, and applies them to individual and team work. Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives.Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.

    Predictable Results in Unpredictable Times is about four essentials for getting great performance in good times and bad. (1) Excellent Execution: Winning companies have simple goals with clear targets and strong follow-through. All team members know what to do about the goals and they execute precisely. (2) High Trust Levels with All Stakeholders: Low trust slows you down and raises your costsespecially in times of turmoil. But when trust levels rise, everything speeds up and costs go down. (3) Achieving More with Less: In tough times, everyone tries to do more with less, but the real question is more of what? Winning companies focus on giving more valuenot just cutting back. (4) Transforming Fear into Engagement: Unpredictable times create anxieties that distract you just when you need total focus. Winning o

    That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

    Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. We hope that this book helps you and your teams to do retrospectives effectively and efficiently to reflect upon your ways of working, and continuously improve them!

    The central premise of Strategic Project Management Made Simple is that most projects and strategies never get off the ground because of adhoc, haphazard, and obsolete methods used to turn their ideas into coherent and actionable plans. Strategic Project Management Made Simple is the first book to couple a step-by-step process with an interactive thinking tool that takes a strategic approach to designing projects and action initiatives. Strategic Project Management Made Simple builds a solid platform upon four critical questions that are vital for teams to intelligently answer in order to create their own strong, strategic foundation. These questions are: 1. What are we trying to accomplish and why? 2. How will we measure success? 3. What other conditions must exist? 4. How do we get there? This fresh approach begins with clearly understanding the what and why of a project - comprehending the bigger picture goals that are often given only lip service or cursory reviews. The second and third questions clarify success measures and identify the risky assumptions that can later cause pain if not spotted early. The how questions - what are the activities, budgets, and schedules - comes last in our four-question system. By contrast, most project approaches prematurely concentrate on the how without first adequately addressing the three other questions. These four questions guide readers into fleshing out a simple, yet sophisticated, mental workbench called the Logical Framework - a Systems Thinking paradigm that lays out one's own project strategy in an easily accessible, interactive 4x4 matrix. The inclusion of memorable features and concepts (four critical questions, LogFrame matrix, If-then thinking, and Implementation Equation) make this book unique.

    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.

    This is your permission slip to take back control of your business, enforce standards, manage for maximum profit and actually get performance from your people! Kennedy covers: • The true nature of employer-employee relationships: friendly while you feed them (Why ownership mentality is a futile and dangerous goal) • The two most crucial (and liberating) management decisions • The worst number in business is…(fix this before it’s too late!) • Leadership is vastly overrated: a new, rational model for profitable productivity • Why and how to make marketing the master—all others servants • Mice at play, and how to get compliance when the cat’s away • Finding the magic “GE-Spot” for your particular business’ greatest success with its customers • Fairness be damned—to the winners the spoils (it’s time to start paying for performance, not for showing up) • Is a happy workplace a productive workplace? a serious look at the new, fun mandate—lies the management theorists sell • Managing the sales process—the biggest instant improvement (more $ now!)

    City infrastructure was crumbling, strong financial policies and systems were nonexistent, many executive positions were vacant, public satisfaction was low, ethical standards were weak, and public safety union salaries and benefits were outpacing revenues, crowding out other essential city services. Simply put: San Antonio was on the verge of collapse.Greedy Bastards tells the story of Sheryl and her new team's uphill battle to turn around San Antonio city government. She takes you behind closed doors to share the hard changes she made and the strategies she used to create mutually beneficial solutions to the city's biggest problems.Many of the issues Sheryl found in San Antonio are present in cities across the US. Packed with wins and losses, lessons learned, and pitfalls encountered, Greedy Bastards is a guidebook for any city official tasked with turning around a struggling city.

    Worse, it often causes dysfunctional and unethical managerial behavior. Based on an intensive, international study into pioneering companies, Beyond Budgeting offers an alternative, coherent management model that overcomes the limitations of traditional budgeting. Focused around achieving sustained improvement relative to competitors, it provides a guiding framework for managing in the twenty-first century.

    It delivers a comprehensive insider's view of lean manufacturing. The author helps the reader to grasp the system as a whole and the factors that animate it by organizing the book around an image of a house of lean production.Highlights include: A comprehensive view of Toyota�s lean manufacturing system A look at the origins and underlying principles of lean Identifying the goals of lean production Practical problem solving for lean production Activities that support involvement - Kaizen circles, suggestion systems, and problem solvingThis second edition has been updated with expanded information on the Lean Improvement Process; Production Physics and Little's Law - the fundamental equation for both manufacturing and service industries (cycle time = work in process/throughput); Value Stream Thinking - combining processes required to bring the product or service to the customer; Hoshin Planning -- using the Planning and Execution Tree diagram and Problem Solving -- including the "Five Why" method and how to use it.Lean Production Simplified, Second Edition covers each of the components of lean within the context of the entire lean production system. The author's straightforward common sense approach makes this book an easily accessible on-the-floor resource for every operator.