Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #142

Howdy all! It's the books issue...

We've packed this issue with the best books to pick up as an engineering leader - these have helped us level up as CTOs and VPs of Engineering, work through challenging situations and build brilliant teams and cultures. Have a look!

If you’re interested in chatting about my 1:1 CTO Coaching or Mentoring, please drop me a line by replying to this email - I have some slots opening in the coming weeks.

As always, if you find something you think should be in the next TMW, drop me a reply to this email

Andy

Curated by Andy Skipper, founder of CTO Craft and mentor and coach to CTOs, VPs of Engineering and other technology leaders around world

Books of the Week

The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Digital Disruption, Redshirts, and Overthrowing the Ancient Powerful Orders

This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage.

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance and what drives it using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for readers to apply in their own organizations.

Culture & People

Dealing with People You Can't Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst

Unfortunately, as the world becomes smaller and time more compressed, new difficult people are being made all the time. So Kirschner and Brinkman have updated their global bestseller to help you wring positive results from even the most twisted interactions you’re likely to experience today.

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships

Widely recognised as the most original and influential psychology book of our time, Games People Play has helped millions of people better understand human basic social interactions and relationships.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

We've all been there: We know we must talk to a colleague, our boss or even a friend about something we know will be at least uncomfortable and at worst explosive. So we repeatedly mull it over until we can no longer put it off, and then finally stumble through a confrontation when we could have had a conversation.

Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life

Do you hunger for skills to improve the quality of your relationships, to deepen your sense of personal empowerment or to simply communicate more effectively? Nonviolent Communication partners practical skills with a powerful consciousness and vocabulary to help you get what you want peacefully.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.

Leadership & Self-management

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way Your Lead Forever

Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how--by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

In this highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini—the seminal expert in the field of influence and persuasion—explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles ethically in business and everyday situations.

High Output Management

In this legendary business book and Silicon Valley staple, the former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses--the art of the entrepreneur--can be summed up in a single word: managing.

Who

In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls "the single biggest problem in business today" unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent.

The Manager's Path

Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal-especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager.

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Devops Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

High-performing organizations are 2.5 times more likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals. The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to create the cultural norms and the technical practices necessary to maximize organizational learning, increase employee satisfaction, and win in the marketplace.

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns.

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

How do today's most successful tech companies--Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla--design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application?

What Else?

Engineering Leadership Interviews: Lessons Learned and Best Practices Gathered from Interviews with Top Engineering Leaders Around the World

Topics including hiring, advice for managers just starting out, time management, how to face some of the biggest challenges that many managers face, and useful resources are contained in short, easy-to-follow interviews with 58 leaders from across the world.

(A 99p very well spent - Andy)

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy