Reviews and Comments

Us tech professionals carry tons of power and responsibility on our shoulders. Either we act like professionals who know what they're doing, or get demoted to mere manual laborers to be bossed around like in a taylorist factory.

The author left out important talking points such as ethics, worker rights, unions, and keeping the industry at large in check. Personal professionalism is important and having a work ethic that aligns with your agency and the organizations goals is good, but not taking that idea a step further and talking about how we collectively could shape our workplaces and the globe is a shame.

All in all a okay primer on the topic on professionalism aimed towards people who work with software. Every junior dev should read this.

And yes, I know Uncle Bob is a questionable figure. But I can't help but share his ideals on professional conduct when it comes to "being an adult" as a software worker working with other people toward shared goals.

A short sort of a to-do-list-ish kind of book with some background sprinkled here and there on why and how things have to change if one wants to shift their organization from project-thinking to product-thinking. The case studies are neat, but most of them sound too good to be true, as in they left out the bad parts of trying to transform an organization.

The ideas and changes presented in the book are clear and actionable, but if you're looking for more on the "why" side of things, you'll need to read way more than just this book.

Marquet writes well about their leadership style aboard a US navy submarine. Military is stereotypically hierarchical, rigid, and conservative when it comes to leadership and management. Marquet and Santa Fe (their submarine) proved that a new way of leading will result in better outcomes, now and down the line.

By employing leader-leader instead of leader-follower thinking, Marquet was able to transform one of the worst performing submarines of its fleet to one of the very best. People were given autonomy to lead on their own, and people became more objective-driven all across the crew. This resulted in a complete shift in how the sub operated and how it achieved results. Marquet talks about various somewhat generalized techniques they tried aboard Santa Fe which were aimed at making followers leaders, but they also do say that one has to apply them with context in mind in other organizations.

But what the book also reveals, is that for unconventional leadership to happen in these kinds of places, there has to be some person higher in the hierarchy who is willing to at least tolerate experimentation and autonomy.

All in all a very good book about leadership in general, not just submarines or military hierarchies.

A short business fable (love 'em!) in which a newly appointed CEO is tasked with fixing a toxic leadership team at a mid-sized tech company. This is a not a tech company book. This is a leadership book. The fable goes over a fictional situation inside a for-profit company's execute team, but the learnings are entirely applicable to other places as well, be it a smaller team inside a company, a non-profit, a hobby club, a political party, or whatever. And by being realatively short (under 200 pages) the book is quite accessible.

Lencioni goes over five interlinked dysfunctions that they've seen in teams, and by power of story gives the reader an approachable overview of how they manifest and what can be done to fix things. At the end of the book Lencioni describes the five dysfunctions model in a practical way with actionables and questionnaires in addition to the fable.

The dysfunctions can be obvious to some people (especially if you're already familiar with things like psychological safety, continuous collaboration, and so on), but based on my personal experience, many more leaders should know about them and how to fix them. Lencioni describes how the dysfunctions feed into each other and for instance how lack of trust between team members can undermine any attempts of making positive outcomes no matter how hard you try.

This book was written by someone who seemingly has managerial experience solely at Facebook. Not a deal-breaker, but one should keep that in mind, as no two organizations are the same, and managers will deal with varying people and problems in varying contexts. Someone who has had a successful managerial career within a single company might make it seem like that kind of success is the default thing to expect on your career.

If you can look past that, you have to remember that this book was written with an USA audience in mind, meaning some guidance might even be bad for you, as some countries have labor laws in place to prevent certain styles of management for instance. Hiring and firing for instance can be very different between countries. Make sure to check local labor legislation and regulation when applying learnings from books like this one.

And if you can get past that, you will find a very okay book about how the author became and manager at Facebook and how their role and skills evolved over the years. Some of it is mainly making sure that you act like a human being towards others, some of it is about strategy-building, some of it is more about tactical choices as to how to manage specific situations, and some of it is how to nurture culture, and some of it is of course about handling negative situations, such as firing someone.

If you're a new manager, it is a good read.

I liked how they ended the book with a clear message that no matter where you are on your career, you are always on a journey that has not finished yet.

A good book based on the experiences of a dude who went observing and studying what constitutes a safe, strong, productive, and effective group. A group here might mean a company, a sports team, a classroom, or maybe a squad of SEALs.

The things Daniel finds out and how they laid out the book to describe how these things work at certain successful organizations is very helpful in terms of making concepts concrete such as building psychological safety, making people work as teams, measuring what matters, and making people aware of the environment they're working in and how it might effect results.

The book is very "leader-oriented", e.g. it mostly assumes that there is a strong and/or respected leader who has to make change happen. I somewhat disagree with this notion and I would suggest reading Humanocracy in addition to this book, while also taking the time to read up about workplace democracy (not just team autonomy) and unionization, and how it might effect results in addition to the things talked about in Culture Code.

If you're a so called "line worker" the things talked about in this book might be interesting to you, but the book really makes no effort towards giving non-leaders any tools or techniques for making bottom-up changes in one's organization to help the organizational culture change.