“We know that Apple has destroyed the music business…”

I’ve read almost halfway through the book Managing Humans, by Michael Lopp, and just thought that I would post a quick update.

Verdict: It has a lot of character, especially for a management book, and I really like it.

Let me explain.

The book is told from the point of view of the same fictional character Michael Lopp uses on his website: Rands.  Rands is semi-fictional, just like all the characters and stories in his book – while they derive from real experiences and situations they’re actually fake.  But they do an amazing job conveying the message.

I like that the book doesn’t sound too definitive.  At no point do I get the feeling that this book has the exact answers, but at every point I keep thinking about how the concepts apply to my own job (I’m a software developer by the way…).  Not feeling like I’m reading a text book makes me feel more relaxed and actually helps me process the information better.

Anyway… I like the book.  It’s easy to read, makes me think, and is funny at times.  I’m reading for pleasure yet I’m still learning so much.  Thanks Rands.

The book is called “Managing Humans” and you can get it at Amazon too if you like.  I’ll be sure to let you know when I give it the official devinsblog thumbs up.

Click on image to see the book teaser:

We want to stress that this is an isolated incident and to re-instill trust with you, we have taken the following courses of action:

- We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.
- We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

Sounds like they’re getting rid of the evidence if you ask me…  All the more so if you take this into account. Wait, who am I to judge – for all we know a different company set this whole thing up…

This post falls directly in line with the book I’m currently reading during all of my airport headaches/flight cancellations: Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social media.  It outlines many case studies of different companies experiences with social media.  The book is from Forrester Research, so they are definitely qualified to talk about this subject.  It’s really a great book that makes sense and is easy to read and understand.  I would recommend it to anybody interested in the impact of social media, especially for those owning a company or managing a purposeful blog.  Collaboration and conversation is VERY powerful and this book shows how to use it to your advantage.  It really shows “Why not exploring Social Media Marketing for your Company is a Mistake.”

So go take a look at Taylor Graves’ post and then grab a copy of Groundswell!

General trend for thinking ahead at an organization

As an example I’ve drafted up a small graph that depicts a relatively shallow company structure, but shows the time span for which each role should be thinking ahead. At the top of the company structure we have the CEO. Depending on the company or industry the CEO might think ahead as far as 30 years or more (my example graph depicts only 10 years).  At the bottom we have a software developer, who might only make decisions day to day that will fit into a 1 month outlook. This graph is by no means the definitive guide, but depicts the general trend.

In order to effectively plan ahead, each specific role must delegate their attention wisely to the different steps that must be taken to reach the goal. By wisely I mean that attention should strictly be given only to those tasks that affect the goal.  By placing attention elsewhere the plan can fall apart.  What’s worse is that this effect falls down the chain of command, and each of the people that works under that relative superior is also not thinking as far ahead.  For example, if the VP of Sales starts making short term goals a top priority, and loses site of the long term 5 year goal, all of the decisions that are made by the Director will have to comply with the VP’s shorter goal, and the director will have to focus on an even smaller chunk to make sure that the details of this plan get worked out.  Right when a superior starts concerning (him/her)self with the details that should be the focus of a subordinate, the whole organization can lose site of any sort of long term goals.

If the VP of Sales starts focusing on a short term goal the whole system under the VP fails.

To combat this issue, each role should split their forward-thinking time span up into a specific number of pieces (which would likely depend on the business and/or industry). As an example we’ll just separate each outlook into 30 pieces. This means that each role will have 30 sub-sections to focus on in order to reach the end goal.  A developer might focus on day-to-day tasks in order to reach a 1 month goal (maybe a specific development of a skill); a project manager would make sure that things were falling into place every two weeks (maybe a goal to reduce project overhead and increase efficiency); the CEO would be focusing on making sure things were coming together quarterly, bi-annually, or maybe even just once a year (most likely focusing on a goal that defines where the company is headed over the next 10-30 years).