What I’ve been reading
American Icon. Pleasantly surprised at this part business history part business case study. It dampens down a lot of tropes and structures you get with these books, while giving a good sense of the state of the the Ford Motor Company and how it survived. One criticism is the glossing over of what were some pretty severe redundancies and some awkward nothing to see here around executive pay-cuts. Kind of like The Goal, but based on true life events and with finer dramatisation. Recommended.
The Pyramid Principle (again). I don’t think I really appreciated, or perhaps wasn’t competent enough to appreciate, how good this book was first time around long time ago. It’s easily in the top tier of books for writing and thinking in a non-fiction context. If your work for a living involves written mid to long form communication with colleagues (and I suspect that’s a lot of us), it’s essential.
Staff Engineer. As an expert contributor I might be the target audience for this book. Yet I found myself bouncing off it. It feels perhaps like what management want highly graded engineers to be, or imagine they should be, rather that what engineers need to be for a software reliant organisation. The archetypes for example, I’m not sure are exclusive or exhaustive, and I found myself in practice mapping them closer to hats you wear in some circumstances rather than consistent roles you play over time (for example, this breakdown doesn’t seem more general than pioneers/settlers/townbuilders at the individual level). I’ll have to come back to again I expect. Recommended nonetheless.
The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs. Absolute eye opener of a book. Goes all the way back to covering where functions like engineers, managers, scientists came from and how they were expected to be deployed and what they were expected to provide, reminding us, at one point we made all this stuff up (today we take them as givens). if you’ve worked with or led different specialisations on projects and programs, this might provide some insight. The only book that comes to mind quickly that’s more foundational is Science: The Endless Frontier (which works at a broader “where did R&D come from?” level). It seems we may have had a lot of this figured out by the early 70s, and somehow failed to carry the knowledge forward, and are cycling through incomplete software methodologies (anything from SSADM to Agile/Lean). Recommended.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Likely the best, certainly most comprehensive overview of how Amazon functions, as opposed to gleaning bits and pieces from online posts and articles. From the point of view of software development in particular, the content around two-pizza teams and to an extent moving past that to single threaded focus, is informative. Jocko Willink fans may appreciate the observation that the biggest predictor of team success was not “was not whether it was small but whether it had a leader with the appropriate skills, authority, and experience to staff and manage a team“, something often absent from discussions around ideal team size. Recommended.