Manager Reads - Retrospective 1.0

02 Jul 2018

The past two months have led me through four great reads on the never-ending pursuit to being a better manager. In true engineering manager fashion, it’s a good time to take a pause and retrospect on my experience thus far.

• Has reading these books been worthwhile? An emphatic yes. These books don’t provide a silver bullet on becoming the best manager but they do provide some great strategies for all things related to management. Even in the past two months, I’ve found myself pulling from each of the four books in my day-to-day life at work and even at home.
• These book titles are long! I’m a stickler and like to keep my blog titles to a single line. These book titles forced me to reduce the point size for my titles from 1.75rem to 1.50rem. I fear that I have yet to experience the worst of title lengths too! 🙀
• Taking notes on books has become a bottleneck. For each book I’ve committed to grabbing the useful gems and jotting them down in Evernote. 🐘 My hope is that I can review these shorter (relative to the book) notes in the future to refresh my knowledge. The downside of this is that transcribing these notes has become nearly as time consuming as reading the book itself.

Since this reading exercise has been very fruitful, I plan to keep on gathering recommendations and keep on slogging through more books.

Bonus! To provide some continuity through this reading experience, with each retrospective I will be providing Title Length Power Rankings™ – brevity is the soul of this rank – and Judge a Book by Its Cover Power Ranking™ – books shall be judged by their covers.

Title Length Power Rankings™

1. High Output Management (23)
2. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (56)
3. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (58)
4. Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration (59)

Judge a Book by Its Cover Power Ranking™

1. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
2. Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration
3. High Output Management
4. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

📚🙇📖

Most of the world’s wisdom is written down in its best books. Manager Reads is a series covering books on management and leadership, focusing on books that can improve your own leadership with the wisdom of others. Enjoyed this post and want to see more? Check out more at Manager Reads.