Reviews for Socioeconomic impact management

The average rating for Socioeconomic impact management based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-11-08 00:00:00 Edward Brooks I think there is one big idea to Slack that makes it worth reading for anyone dealing with leadership or leading at scale. A lot of the rest of the book is fairly obvious or not practical, so not giving it five stars. The big idea of this book is that creativity can't be rushed, and if you don't build the slack into your schedule to spend some time creatively thinking about your business, you won't be able to innovate. You will only be able to be reactive, not proactive. The "Hurry Up" mindset is so easy to slip into - because there is always more to do than there is time. Providing a theory and data around the fact that having slack in your schedule is not only ok, but it's a good thing, is almost counter-intuitive, and thus really valuable to think about. The book talks about how some companies slip into a "hurry up" mindset where everyone wants to look busy all the time. The danger of being busy is that you can too easily - especially if you are only being reactive - be busy on working on the wrong stuff. "Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it's not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything." When managing people there is another kind of slack that the book points out: the slack to give up control to someone. Highly functioning people like to own their goals and process and have leeway to accomplish them on their own. As a manager, one of the hardest tasks is to balance giving them that autonomy with occasionally checking in or diving in to make sure things are on track. If you do it too much, you will annoy people or cause them to leave - if you do it too little your team could be wasting time heading in the wrong direction. Other interesting points: * In a hurry up organization, there is a natural tendency to try to get people to work harder/more to meet deadlines. While this can work over short stints, it's generally not sustainable. In fact, the book had a bunch of data to show that on average overtime hours aren't more productive. * They analyzed the "star performers" in a number of companies, and the only thing they had in common they could point to was the strength of their networks. Establishing good connections and doing favors for others let's you get stuff done faster when you need to. * The book makes a point that setting Quality goals for companies can be dangerous b/c you can so easily focus on the wrong metrics. For instance, reducing the number of bugs is correlated with quality, but it isn't the same thing as making a great product. This seems pretty obvious, so I'm not sure why it needed to be included in the book. * It's important to set a vision for the organizations culture. The culture are those things that are so important to the organization that they should never change. If a organization lacks those, it will define itself as status quo and resist all change. * Effective leaders build up trust, often before they've even earned it. The most effective way to do this is to acquire trust by giving trust. The act of giving trust is an enormously powerful gesture. The author told a story about a woman giving him her 2 year old daughter to carry off the plane. The trust she showed impressed him. A great summary of the book: "Reinvention takes place in the middle of the organization, so the first requisite is that there has to be a middle. I'll assume your organization still has one. Now pour in some slack, increase safety, and take steps to break down managerial isolation. Viola, the formula for middle-of-the-hierarchy reinvention."

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-13 00:00:00 Claire Duffy I picked this up because I recognized DeMarco's name from one of my favorite business books of all time, Peopleware. This is a fast read'DeMarco meant it to be read by busy managers on a flight'but it's dense with insights. Some of the more memorable ones: "People under time pressure don't think faster." (50, quoting Lister, co-author of Peopleware) Productivity of knowledge workers is almost entirely based on the number of days worked, not hours (64) "The first law of bad management: If something isn't working, do more of it" (80) "healthy [leadership] involves people leading their bosses, leading their peers, leading those in peer organizations...without ever being granted the official power to do what they're doing" (141) "acquire trust by giving trust" (152) ... just a small selection of the many gems in the book. Not only will you recognize many of the bad management processes from projects you've been on, DeMarco does a great job of contrasting bad management with good management (better called leadership). He repeats several times that good management is much more difficult and counter-intuitive, which explains why it's relatively rare. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be part of the healthy, successful company, because you (not someone else) have to make it that way.