Bradfield School Leadership Reading
The following lists most of the Bradfield Engineering Leadership course reading material. What doesn’t appear here is material overlapping what Hinge Health doing better on, and a couple of titles which either are not relevant, or simply hold no interest to me at this time. The course syllabus is in the linked document collection.
This is a lot of reading! The course itself specified selected chapters from some of the books, and other books were suggested as optional reading. I’m not making any distinction between required and optional reading in the following. The amount of reading over the roughly 5 week, 8 session course was heavy, but I found it manageable.
High Output Management
This is a classic, and well-known at Hinge Health. Gabe led several book reviews sessions on it in 2018. It’s always worth rereading.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Reads like a classic, but apparently not that well known in the startup industry, which is unfortunate in my opinion. The author dissects what strategy really means, and how to think about it.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
Tom DeMarco is well-known in IT circles due to decades of work in the industry, well-documented with decades of writing about work in the IT industry. He makes a compelling case against keeping software developers (really, any knowledge worker) from being fully subscribed. That is, knowledge workers must have some slack in their schedule to perform at peak effectiveness.
Nonviolent Communication
This is an important book, not so much for the specific content (although much of that is tremendously useful), but for the notion that communication style can be changed, that anyone who desires can make such changes, and that applying non-violent communication principles allow people “to exchange words in a way that excludes judgments, blame and violence.” Given that judgment, blame, and violence are often ineffective means of conflict resolution, applying non-violent communication has little downside and large upside.
Scrum and XP from the Trenches
For someone unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of Scrum, this book is an excellent introduction. It really goes into the methodology in detail, shifting focus from step to step of the Scrum process. The detail comes with a danger, as the author notes: this is how he does Scrum. It’s not the only way to do it, and in fact, most situations will vary to some extent and require modifying the process outlined in the book. (Or using a different process.) Give the short length of the book, it’s worth a quick read.
First, Break All the Rules
This book is difficult for me to read for the best reason: every few pages I want to jump out of my chair and try out the methodology!
The main lesson of the book is to leverage people’s natural propensity to do what they do (which the author’s define as talent) by defining appropriate outcomes, then getting out of the way. They also present a methodology for extracting talent information from candidate interviews.
In my opinion, the authors have one very large blind spot. They assert that talents cannot be taught, and by implication, cannot be learned past one’s initial childhood experience’s shaped by brain development. However, much more recent advances in neuroplasticity suggest much the opposite: new neural pathways may, with effort, be carved into one’s thought processes.
The book is extraordinarily useful nonetheless. It’s on my reread list in fact.
Expecting Short Inferential Distances
This is a fairly short blog post which posits an evolutionary basis for communication difficulty between (for example) sales and engineering. The communication gap is an “inferential distance” measured by the number of steps of reasoning to establish the truth of a claim from one set of background premises to another. The author notes that, prehistorically, hunter gathering bands of 200 people would have very short inferential distances from the known to the unknown. In contrast, modern society is riddled with very large inferential distances.
The author notes that expecting short inferential distances practically guarantees miscommunication, and that taking one step towards closing the inferential distance is probably not enough. (On the other hand, from personal experience, taking too many steps may expose one to charges of arrogance!)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
This is an absolutely fascinating glimpse into the inner conversation of the early 1970’s feminist movement. The premise is that there is no such thing as a “flat” organization. Power structures are always present, whether explicitly or implicitly defined. The absence of formal power structures does not prevent the presence of informal structures. In the author’s day, this power was in the (unstructured) hands of small groups of friends who also happened to participate in feminism, the central irony being replication of the “locker room” network traditionally denied to women.
The author makes a number of exceedingly perceptive observations along similar lines, defining the nature of “elite,” and arguing for transparent decision making, with the decision making rules open to everyone.
Honestly, the article is worth reading solely for the exemplary use of “foundered.”
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
Legibiility as described as the notion of imposing structure on percieved chaos. In particular, rendering a complex, unreadable system into something legible, readable, which can then be understood, measured, taxed, etc. This notion can be amazingly useful. For example, the creation of sensible and systematic global time zones enables modern commerce.
As a failure pattern, legibility induced by a perceived need to impose structure on an otherwise working but nuanced system, results from flawed reasoning. It is not a result of any particular ideology. For example, “paving the cowpaths” and “choice architecture” may not provide immunity from legibility-induced failure. The author also notes that waterfall planning can be seen as a subset of the more general notion of legibility.
The main lesson: rendering a system legibile works when the fundamental nuance is understood and accounted for, and fails otherwise.
The Manager’s Path
From page 1: “Unfortunately, I’ve come to see that there are people who have never in their careers had a good manager.”
Engineering management is difficult for all the same reasons any sort of management is difficult, and made even more difficult by the extremely fast pace of change in technology. This really matters, as a manager stuck in, say, 1990s management is going to have a vastly out of date notion of how software is designed, implemented, and delivered. The crux of engineering management is balancing the breadth and depth of technical knowledge required to make effective (i.e., profitable) decisions.
The auther extensively discusses this point, concluding that wherever the balance point between pure people and pure technical may be, organizational support for that balance point matters a lot.
This is not a difficult read, and I’ll be rereading it.
Illusion of validity
The eponymoud Wikipedia was the reading for this concept. In short, the illusion of validity occurs when assigning meaning from a set of facts, where the meaning is coherent, but wrong. The disconnect may be induced when the frequency of observation outpaces the distribution. The effect is closely related to confirmation bias.
Politics and the English Language
Orwell claims, in 1946, that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Reading Orwell’s essay in 2019, it’s hard to see that anything has changed, at least in political language. Arguably more important is the point of the essay: a writer should use language, rather than be used by language. Notably, using plain, simple language, “when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.” Worth regular rereading.
Making Sense of Sensemaking
Sensemaking is a term for describing how people make sense of their experience in life. As notion, it’s distinctly different from curiousity, creativity, comprehension, or mental modeling, albeit with aspects of each. The paper’s main premise is that understanding sensemaking will be a necessary step in advancing human computer interaction, a person and the interacting machine will need to be congruent within the “sense” of the interaction.
Thinking Fast and Slow
This book is also on my Hinge Health reading list. It is very dense, probably denser than The Black Swan. The basic notion is humans have two systems of thinking: fast and slow, such that the same inputs will produce different outputs depending on which system of thinking is employed. Given the length of the book, and that it’s on the Hinge Health reading list, no more needs to be noted here.
Reorgs Happen
This is a very short blog post providing some high level disussion of various pitfalls which may be induced by reorganization. The author notes that a successful reorganization requires vision, the skill to accomplish it, incentives for people to accept the reorg, the resources to enable, and an action plan with enough details to execute. Getting any one of these wrong is likely to induce less-the-optimal results. Again, very short and worth reading.
The Illusion of Transparency
This could possibly be one of the most important articles or books on this list. If you only have time to read 1, 2, or 5 or not all of material on the list, “The Illusion of Transparency” might well provide the most bang for the buck. The premise is that other people are not actually mind readers, so it’s not productive to assume they are. To wit: I am the only person who knows exactly what I am thinking and how I am feeling. The illusion is assuming thoughts and feelings are “transparent.” The concept is closely related to “you are not your emotions.”
This is a good general principle. It fails in places where people are inclined to show transparency. For example, when playing poker learning other’s tells is a great way to win a lot of money.
How Gender Bias Corrupts Performance Reviews and What To Do About It
This is a blog post promoting the use of customized weekly rather than standardized annual feedback to better serve women in the workforce. The author lists numerous benefits, backed scientific studies, which are described in a forthcoming book by the author.
My hunch is the proposed methodology would benefit everyone. Since we’re more or less short cycle feedback (weekly or biweekly at least in engineering) at Hinge Health already, we might be closer than not to the author’s ideal feedback cycle.
Identity Based Habits
This is an excerpt from James Clear’s “Atomic Habits.” The notion is to render a habit into a component of one’s identity. For (my) example, making a habit of going to work everyday might induce the identity of “working stiff.” One habitually goes to work because that’s what working people do. While my example may seem self-referential, it’s precisely that sort of feedback loop the author advocates for locking in a habit. I’m looking forward to finishing the author’s book.
Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review
“Performance reviews are obsolete” declares this author, who goes on to build a rationale and framework incorporating coaching techniques for improving performance and outcomes.
The first third of the book spends a lot of time setting up existing performance management as bogeyman, with a very detailed analysis of costs, and an invitation to the reader to ponder the benefits.
The second half of the book describes the Catalytic Coaching model in detail. The notion is that managing for performance allows a manager to focus on coaching as a catalyst for self-directed improvement. Coaching sessions take the place of performance reviews, and the book provides working, tested techniques for coaching.
Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them
This article is a short recap of Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit.” The article describes the feedback loop for building habits, and discusses a few ways habits have been leveraged for marketing.
I’ve read the actual book at least once, and applied the material to personal and professional development. When I say “it’s money” I’m being literal. Hinge Health being in the behavior business, Duhigg’s material is also applicable to how we operate as a company, and how we help people change their own behavior.
Climbing the infinite ladder of abstraction
Note: this one is best served to programmers.
The author’s premise is that abstraction serves a real purpose, and complicated abstractions, when correctly implemented, are the most useful way to solve complicated problems.
For those familiar with Paul Graham’s writing, in particular the notion of the “blub programmer,” the author drives it home with “Every time I climb to the next rung on the ladder of abstraction, those only a couple rungs below me (even if we’re all hundreds of rungs up!) find themselves perplexed.”
The crux is that abstraction may cost useability and comprehension, which excludes understanding by the cursory reader. Whether an abstraction is worth the purchase price is the author’s central dilemma. In the end, the most important thing is being aware of both abstraction and cost.
To Sell is Human
The main premise is that most knowledge workers spend a fair amount of time communicating, and this communication often needs to be persuasivem, hence, knowledge workers are in some real sense engaged in sales work.
The author proposes “seller beware” (caveat venditor) as the watchword for selling in an environment where information is ubiquituous, where information asymmetry between seller and buyer is minimal. In this environment, sales people (which is also to say knowledge workers) must shift focus from solving problems to finding problems. Finding a problem means understanding what the prospect actually needs, for example, if the problem is clean floors, a vacuum cleaner isn’t the only solution.
Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life
This is one I wasn’t prepared to enjoy, but after getting started, I’ve decided I’ll be applying the material on a regular basis. The idea is that negotiation is part and parcel of most everything we do, so it behooves us to learn how it actually works: emotions matter.
I have not yet finished this book, but even early on I’m struck with similarity to another book, “Never Split the Difference,” which teaches the same lesson in the high stakes arena of hostage negotiation. Both books emphasize the essential humanity of the negotiation partner.