The New One Minute Manager

Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson
ISBN-13: 978-0008128043

I'm not and have never been a people person, but I try. I am and have always been a techy. I managed teams at two different companies before I formed Naked Element. In both cases I was as green as I was cabbage looking. I had a lot to learn about managing up and down and what encourages and discourages people. Unfortunately I didn't have the best guidance either.

When I want to get better at software development or Agile or something else technical, I consult experienced people to learn. In most cases, for me, this involves reading a book. So why should it be any different for people? Well, people are more complex than software development, Agile or any other tech, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from other's experience.

The One Minute Manager is a book about people and how to get the best from them. It describes three practices to help. One of the best things about the book isn't just the excellent advice with clear examples and explanation, but the fact it's easy to read and takes only a few hours. I read most of it one evening and finished it the next morning.

I'm not going to list the practices here - go read the book. It showed me what I was doing wrong, why what I was doing didn't work and how I could improve. It's not a silver bullet, there is work I am going to have to do to get better.

The only criticism I have, other that some of the cheesy dialogue, is that there are no written examples of the first practice. I'm having to go to other sources for this, but at least they're readily available.

If you feel you could be better at managing people, and even if you think you're already good at it, start with this book and get better. I've already started doing the practices and I'm looking forward to the results.

Comments

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...

RESTful Behaviour Guide

I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog