Readings and Watchings on Leadership

Christopher Haag
3 min readMay 19, 2020

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These are a few of my favorites

Accelerate: https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/

Richard Cook On Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems

Management advice

Product Management

All software engineering leaders should read Marty Cagan’s book Inspired and follow the SVPG blog and send your PMs to their trainings.

Management Training

I’ve worked with these companies and have found them useful in building high performing teams.

https://www.joinenrich.com/

Intrinsic Motivation (versus extrinsic)

Dan Pink (autonomy, mastery, & purpose) video link

IMO, the 20 minute video is all you need.

Models for performance evaluation

Netflix: Adequate performance gets a nice severance
See Slide 23

Data Science

The Gradient is a great way to stay up to date

Stitch Fix’s excellent article on Full Stack Data Science

I love how Netflix thinks about data analytics work

https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/08/19/framework-for-responsible-innovation/

Personality Styles

Meyers Briggs
Useful as way to teach the concept of “personality styles”, but not a predictor of behavior

Big 5 AKA “OCEAN” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Enneagram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality
https://www.theartofgrowth.org/
My favorite starter book “Enneagram Made Easy

Adult Attachment Styles
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/compassion-matters/201307/how-your-attachment-style-impacts-your-relationship

Attached: The New Science…
More focused on couples but still relevant to work relationships

Systems thinking and organizational effectiveness

Remote Work

https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate

https://increment.com/teams/a-guide-to-distributed-teams/

Titles and Levels

Training your amateur Psychologist

Culture
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/copy-paste-repeat/id1448815461

Pithy Sayings and Aphorisms

  • “Least cost learning” (unknown)
  • “Improving daily work is more important than doing daily work” (The Phoenix Project)
  • “What’s my favorite type of problem? Somebody else’s!” (me)
  • “2 in a box never works out” (unknown)
  • “Reward outcomes not activities” (every manager 101 training)
  • “Automated high-confidence deployments” (me)
  • “ All models are wrong, some are useful” (George Box)
  • “There is ONE backlog and Product owns it” (me)
  • “What you do often, you do well” (unknown)
  • “The normalization of deviance” John Banja

Generally useful things

Git Cheat Sheet: https://ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html#loc=remote_repo;

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Christopher Haag
Christopher Haag

Written by Christopher Haag

Interested in engineering leadership, psychology, science, politics and good speculative fiction.

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