Which is fair. These can be good jumping off points. It would be wonderful if Perell credited (for example) the book The Goal for his reference to the Theory of Constraints, etc.

Yep The Goal is absolutely brilliant. I have read it 3 times and will read it again.

Author here. I loved "The Goal" even more than the Unicorn Project. Use the Theory of Constraints to identify your bottleneck and then limit WIP at the bottleneck or elevate it. By hiring, optimizing...

You are right though: go read The Goal everyone!

The Fifth Discipline by Senge.
Also a great introduction to systems thinking.

Also everything written by Goldratt.

In particular:
The Goal and
It's not luck
Both are business novels, they read lightly but the lessons are profound.

The Goal is a great introduction to the concepts that underlie thinking about supply chain problems and should be considered a must-read.

I did not write The Goal ;)

A co-worker sent this one to me... I wouldn't say those are my favorite 3 (though I've read them all).

1. The Goal - Goldratt
2. The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim
3. Lean Startup - Eric Reis

All three are great books. The Effective Executive is very old school, but timeless. The Goal helps me understand some of the thinking of Amazon.

The Goal is one of my favorite “business” book (it’s written as a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

You are right of course, it’s just theory of constraints applied to software. I did read The Goal first before those two :)

My observation has been that theory of constraints is a hidden secret in engineering and most people instead refer to the devops/phoenix version of it.

I would recommend The Goal (E. Goldratt) over The Phoenix Project. Although The Goal is not about IT, I feel it’s much more didactic on how to identify problems and deal with them. In The Phoenix Project, things kinda fall into place without any deeper reasoning about why they should.

not my area, but for basics of resource flows, check out The Goal by Goldratt, a quick read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_M._Goldratt#Writings

Please don't hide stuff behind links.

It's the spinoff to The Goal:

Eliyahu M. Goldratt and 2 more

Isn’t It Obvious?: A Business Novel on Retailing Using the Theory of Constraints

I need to reread The Goal again.

"people are trying to fallaciously optimize on cost rather than marginal profit."

Pure truth.

Another great book is The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

If you want to read about flawed metrics, how they affect the production and what to do about it in a form of interesting novel - check out The Goal by Elijjahu M. Goldratt. It's a classic, but gets recommended seldom for how good it is.

For me it was a sequence of books that did it. The Phoenix Project first, then David Anderson's Kanban book. Some tine after that was The Goal and Deming's Out Of The Crisis, and a book of Taichi Ohno musings.

You're right, what has been seen cannot be unseen.

The Goal is one my favorite books to recommend to anyone joining a startup, but also for product management types. I first read it around the same time I read The Lean Startup, and I found the two to be very complementary.

Having recently listened to The Goal on Audible, it may be worth noting that it has multiple voice actors as well as ambient background sounds. Definitely adds some color to an already impressive novel.

I've read The Goal and The Phoenix Project. While I did enjoy the stories, I'm uncertain, perhaps due to inexperience, what the main lesson/s are supposed to be.

Anyone want to share their main takeaways from these books?

I didn't read The Goal but one of the key point of the Phoenix Project is that the same principles that make a factory efficient (or inefficient) are exactly the same for software and IT.

I had a CTO loan me "The Goal" after I came back from USENIX in Boston (2011) talking about devops and shite... Its a good read and gave context to the Phoenix project without being a spoiler...

Goldratt is excellent for optimising processes with well defined goals.

This is ofen true in business software.

If you want to optimise a learning process, The Principles of Product Development Flow is more relevant.

The two books (The Goal vs The Principles of Product Development Flow) give very different, seemingly opposite advice.

Taiichi Ohno published the original "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Manufacturing" in 1978 (the English translation was published in 1988), while Goldratt's "The Goal" was published in 1984.

Anyone ever read The Phoenix Project [0] or The Goal [1]?

The scenario the author described sounds just like the beginning stages from the Phoenix Project (overwhelming amount of tickets, what's the priority, what even are all of these tickets, printing them out to make the work visible).

The concept is Work in Process (WIP). You first need to see it and understand how it moves, or doesn't move throughout the DevOps system.

It seems like there might be a quick, easy read that could truly help OP.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal

The Goal was actually the primary inspiration for The Phoenix Project, iirc. I think it was mentioned at the end of the book.

I think it is more like him giving me the book The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (which was great and opened my eyes a lot) and me returning the gesture.
On the other thing - I've just 2.5x-ed the sales now but we are working out together how to scale production. So I am looking on ways to optimise our relationship.

I’d suggest books and maybe journals. I’m perhaps a membership with ACM or IEEE, I’m not a member of either but I’m considering it.

The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow (2017):
https://web.archive.org/web/20170406220055/http://dev-books....

The most mentioned books on HN:
https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-ha

And here’s a list of my most resent book purchase. I have high hopes for these books.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Test Driven Development

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility

The Effective Engineer

Type-Driven Development with Idris

Programming Pearls

The Goal

The Phoenix Project

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

Coders at Work

Code (Charles Petzold)

The Mythical Man Month

Structure and interpretation of computer programs

I stopped reading The Phoenix Project about halfway through... just read The Goal - it's better written and was the original source for the core ideas. Or, said another way, if you've already read any of Goldratt's books, you know the core ideas of the Phoenix Project. Are there other books that could more directly speak to implementation details, sure, probably.

Nah, all the books you need to read about thinking were published in the past year.

I actually happened to read The Goal a few weeks ago, I take you think It’s Not Luck is a worthwhile follow up?

Ooh interesting constraint. The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel[1] is just a little over 100 pages but very easy to read in a single sitting so surely still counts. It's more-or-less the same as the full novel, which is what inspired The Phoenix Project. For a book genuinely under 100 pages, I'll go with The Little Prince[2]. Just a delightful story that reminds you to focus on what's important in life.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35528537-the-goal

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157993.The_Little_Prince

The Phoenix project. Everyone should read, IMO. I actually started with The Goal first. Then Phoenix project and then the Google SRE book.

Minor nitpick - The Goal was first published in 1984.

- Snowball by Alice Schroeder (it's a biography of Warren Buffett). So many life lessons here (in addition to teaching you a way to think through investing)

- The Goal (and its descendants). Changes the way you look at organizations

- Inner Engineering by Sadhguru [0]. Changes the way you look at yourself. I'd say base some of your life decisions around this and you'll live better

- The little book that builds wealth [1] . No, despite the corny title it's about companies that have managed to build moats around them. If you are / want to be an entrepreneur, I am sure you will get some wonderful ideas from this. My personal favourite (to invest in - Waste management companies :) )

[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Inner-Engineering-Sadhguru/dp/0812...

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Little-Book-That-Builds-Wealth/dp/...

The Goal is a book that influenced me over 25 years ago. The concepts are sound but i have gifted it to over 20 people since and a handful get it for what it is. However it isn’t a book about business and more a story about complexity and constraints applied to a theoretical business. I have never had occasions where there is an aha moment about a business i am in that literally is explained in The Goal.

It seems to me you have the makings of a good partnership and i have read your comments and it does look like you are committed. In my opinion you could shift to looking at how your customers view your business and working backwards. It might be that your answers are to be less self obsessed and more customer obsessed. Not saying you are not doing this already but in my view the hierarchy for a business prioritises the customer first and works backwards. Issues in your partnership can then be weighed against this mission. Good luck.

But it consumes time and effort to hire/rent people and creates unnecessary churn to have people all running at 100%. The machine version of this is nicely discussed in a book written by Eli Goldratt called The Goal with a more people & project based take on it called Critical Chain. They're in novel form (there are more serious treatments available of the general Theory of Constraints), but it discusses why running each resource, person or machine, at 100% in an organization isn't actually the most efficient thing to do for an organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_M._Goldratt

Would someone be willing to do a quick "for engineers" précis of the core ideas of his theory of constraints?

I ask as I've seen The Goal and some other books of his on a colleague's desk. Have to admit that on the surface it does look like exactly the kind of "management self-help" book that I'd naturally be a bit skeptical of, but it sounds like this guy is somewhat respected amongst the technology crowd so I'd be interested to find out a bit more. Without necessarily going as far as reading a novel about operational management of a factory :)

I agree that The Goal isn't the greatest literary novel in history; but then it doesn't set out to be that.

For me, the genius of ToC is that it provides a focussed, step-by-step way to get to the big productivity improvements; whereas lean/kaizen, while also very effective, can take an age to get to the same place.

Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson - amazing book about US criminal justice system. Read it.

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt - a management novel. Oddly engrossing and educational at the same time

The Everything Store by Brad Stone - about Amazon's history, culture, businesses

(None of these books was written in 2018. I just read them in 2018)

First and foremost - it's not about you. Millions of people are getting laid off daily now due to the exceptional circumstances.

It's ok to feel down for some time, but it's important to understand the broad picture and not take this personally - regardless of what you were told.

Now, regarding leadership resources, I would recommend to start with the following (in this order):

Moneyball (movie), books: The Goal, The Phoenix Project, The Mythical Man-Month, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, The Culture Code and in-between those - various Simon Sinek videos.

If you read this far, you should be able to continue finding materials on your own from here ;)

Best of luck!

Hmm. My picks would be very different, aside from 'The Pragmatic Programmer', which is worth reading early in your career.

Leo Brodie, 'Thinking Forth'

Roland, 'Program Construction'

Ullman, 'Elements of ML Programming'

De Marco, 'The Deadline'

Brooks, 'The Mythical Man-Month'

Skiena, 'The Algorithm Design Manual'

Hunt, 'The Pragmatic Programmer'

Stevens, 'Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment'

Stevens, 'TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1'

Ross Anderson, 'Security Engineering'

Also, the Phoenix Project is a ripoff of Goldratt's 'The Goal.' I suggest reading Goldratt instead, and then think very carefully about what transfers from manufacturing to software.

I read The Phoenix Project several times, but compared with The Goal it has very little to teach you. It is a nice story, easy to relate, but extremely hard to understand what is it that needs to be done at an organization to move it through this kind of change. IMHO it is much easier to follow and learn a process of improvement in Goldratt's books.

Actually, the full title of "The Goal" is "The Goal: A Process of ongoing Improvement". Goldratt used to call it POOGI.

Nah, you've just re-discovered Just In Time and the Theory of Constraints. You've read "The Phoenix Project," right? Go read "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt. TPP was based on The Goal, and reading both illustrated how many of the solutions that software development experts have landed on to improve productivity and the chance of a successful project are the same as the manufacturing problem solutions that manufacturers landed on twenty to thirty years ago.

I have a degree in logistics, but I work as a scripting-heavy systems engineer. My hobby is home construction, especially building systems like drainage planes, vapor management in walls, and structured wiring and plumbing. It's literally all the same thing with almost identical sets of problems.

I mostly started reading alot since March 2017 up to now.
I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting alot but, this is what I've been reading or have read so far:

Eternal Golden Braid

Shoe Dog

Creativity Inc

High Output Management

Game of Thrones Book 1,2,3

Never Split The Difference

Presuasion

Like Switch

Mans Search For Meaning

The Hard Things about Hard Things

Norse Mythology

Ted Talks

How To Talk to Anyone

How to win friends and influence people

Mckinsey Mind

Mckinsey Edge

Influence

Extreme Ownership

Everything Store

Inner Game of Tennis

Book of Joy

Phoenix Project

The Goal

Hooked

How Google Works

My current box of books that I recommend to new managers on my teams:

Technology Specific:

* An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)

* Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Teams (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)

* Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)

* Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan)

* The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford)

General:

* The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)

* Turn the Ship Around! (L David Marquet)

* Just Culture (Sidney Dekker)

* Leadership on the Line (Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky)

* Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)

Interesting! I've read The Goal before and found it fascinating, but difficult to tie some of the prescriptions to our roles, in particular. It encouraged me to view more of, well, the goal of the company and how we're a machine that processes raw materials (sales leads) and turns it into profit, as well as the different drop offs in the funnel (conversion rate, failure to collect, etc.)

I'll definitely read The Phoenix Project and see if it can better connect the dots for me, thank you.

Thanks. I've read The Goal.

My point is that Chrysler itself was recently sold for less than $10 billion. Maybe Cerberus bought because they knew about this code that was written in a day and now they are going to turn them into a $50 billion dollar software company?

Look out SAP & Oracle...

> I would recommend "The Phoenix Project" and "The Unicorn Project" and "The Goal" to all tech managers.

Goldratt's "The Goal" and its sequels are interesting reading, but please, please internalize the principles he was arguing from for the theory of constraints before trying to apply it to software. Otherwise you end up with "The Pheonix Project" (whose author is apparently making a nice living as a snake oil process consultant, according to friends who have dealt with his appearance in companies) which is the "software factory" mess of the 1980's rewarmed and shoved out the door again. Rather, go read Deming's "The New Economy" (just ignore the section on intrinsic/extrinsic motivation).

For me it's the opposite: for example, I had watched countless videos on "disruption" but did not fully grasp it until I read The Innovator's Dilemma. The same holds true for theory of constraints vs reading The Goal, Robert Cialdini's works on influence, Richard Dawkin's views etc. In all cases, I thought I understood the material before reading the original source, and in every time the books blew me away.

Perhaps there is a dimension about how rigorous the thinking is behind the book. I struggle to imagine a YouTube video that could effectively and convincingly unpack ideas from The Intelligent Investor, The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, etc. Other topics like "How to get rich with x" or pop-sci covered by the likes of Kurzgesagt are simplistic enough for a video essay, but those are seldom worth consuming regardless of medium.

This reminds me of the book The Goal by Eli Goldratt. It's fictional, but there's a story about a boy scout troop that goes on a hike, and there's an overweight kid named Herbie who hikes the slowest. The troop leader teaches everyone that the entire group as a whole will reach the top faster (and stay together) if they keep Herbie in the front.

When you have a bottleneck step in your process, the whole end-to-end process will run the most smoothly if everything else matches pace with the bottleneck.

Like others have mentioned it depends on your goals.

Do you want to build a passive income side business you can run from the beach? Check out The Personal MBA. https://personalmba.com/

Do you want to build a huge rocketship and IPO? Check out Y Combinator's "How To Start A Startup". https://startupclass.samaltman.com/

While these are not "software-specific" business books, I would say it's more important to spend time mastering the fundamentals[1] of business, which is the skill of finding people who want to pay for what you have. Everything else like management[2], operations[3], and marketing[4] can come secondary. This may sound cliché only because real business skills are boring, the same way "To get healthy, diet and exercise" sounds boring.

[1] https://jamesclear.com/fundamentals

[2] Marc Andreessen: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

[3] Eliyahu Goldratt: The Goal

[4] Chip and Dan Heath: Made To Stick

This isn't really a new idea.

For anyone interested in 'systems thinking' and associated optimisations, check out the 'Implementing Lean' book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Implementing-Lean-Software-Developme...

Or The Goal for something slightly different:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement...

I have to say, there's way more wisdom in the more mature 'lean' world than there is in the trendier 'agile'.

I'm reminded of the story of the joint interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

The interviewer asked each of them to write down the one thing that contributed most to their success. Both independently wrote "focus".

https://www.inc.com/marc-emmer/bill-gates-warren-buffett-rev...

I remember reading the book The Goal in business school. What impressed me the most, was that the most efficient path to achieving a goal, is often non-intuitive, and sometimes even involves making destructive choices - choices that outside observers would find absurd and distasteful.

https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...

It's not only about choosing a singular goal, it's also about meticulously calculating your path there.

Don't follow the herd. The pack is FULL of jack-of-all-trades that have a smattering of random skills they picked up. Make literally every life choice with directionality and planning.

There is some clear thinking in authoring very human characters having new ideas and sharing reasons and their steps onscreen.

Memorable, simple stream-of-conscience demos individual struggle with knowledge or lack (within and without an organization).

It has original perspectives - like involved field work - beyond mainstream pictures of business room decisions causing change.

I am a reader - no evangelist fan - having only listened to an audiobook of The Goal because I like both its writing style and development.

Supply Chain Management is typically a specialization in MBA. You may want to consider reaching out to a local Business School SCM professor to get recommendation or look up the syllabus and recommended text for SCM courses. Also, most business schools has continuing education/professional development/certificate courses in SCM, consider those courses.

As /u/bengali3 mentioned, The Goal is a very good quasi-fiction book weaving SCM in the storyline.

That’s what I feel too. It’s like in The Goal by Eli Goldratt. The machinery of building product is all cost. Inventory is cost. Machinery is cost. Only finished sold product is revenue.

Analogously, code is cost, infra is cost, only our sold product is revenue.

A thing I did not understand for a long time is the effect this has on value. Something that produces a low value over a long time may well have been value-negative over the period because of the hidden carrying cost.

Well I don't have a MBA :D, but I do have a masters degree of a similar orientation (Masters in engineering management). I can only recommend the ones I have read and found of value:

[1] Crossing the chasm (Marketing related)

[2] Peopleware (HR related)

[3] How to win friends and influence people (HR related)

[4] The Goal (Business related)

[5] Critical chain (Project management related)

[6] Who moved my cheese (Change management related)

and any of the lean / agile businessy books for ex.

[7] The lean startup

These might not be viewed as traditional MBA material, but my course featured some of these along with more traditional academic books on subjects like financial management, people management, operations etc. I can provide these textbooks to you as well if you like.

*Amazon links just for convenience, no affiliation.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive-Mainstre...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-3...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...

[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0884271951?keywords=eli%20g...

[5] http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Chain-Eliyahu-M-Goldratt/dp/0...

[6] http://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese-Amazing/dp/0399144...

[7] http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-...

I tried doing starts for the first couple years including during school. I've been personally involved in 5 different startups and after my involvement I conducted research to see if my experience was typical. To make a long story short, all 5 starts I participated in were badly managed to the point of failure and this is typical.

Any promise of eventually being the smarter move due to ownership or profit share is not worth it. Only 1 in 10 startups is likely to exist at the 10 year mark, and the majority of those still won't be well funded or be issuing dividends. Working for a startup is roughly similar to playing the lottery, somebody is going to win and it won't be you.

To your point FAANG companies used to be the worst career option because managerial expectations were impossible, but that ended almost a decade ago. If anything, FAANG companies will likely be among the first to even implement a 30 hour 4 day work week in the next 10 years for the same salary as the 40 hour 5 day work week. It's getting batter to work for an established company, and most of the bad managers that insisted on making the working environment terrible are now running the startups.

After years of research the clearest conclusion about who you should work for should always be answered by who has the best management team. Good managers enable work life balance, compensate above average and rarely dictate how to get things done. They should be more interested in making you valuable than whether you plan to stick around, and all of this is supported by real research into successful management techniques (See books like Good to Great, Team of Teams and The Goal for supporting reference materials).

The Goal (by Eliyahu) - changed the way I thought about business operations and about how efficiency can be detrimental to throughput

The Art of Thinking in Systems and The Goal are must read.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Thinking-Systems-Critically-Strat...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002LHRM2O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

The Goal - Eli Goldratt. The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim.

The arguments advanced against an "Operations mindset" are mostly strawmen. Operations is primarily about efficiently operating an organization towards a goal. The type of thinking advanced in the article however is more likely to be pushed by someone with no operations management training.

For instance, putting people on multiple projects versus single projects. Multi-tasking and context switching cause known losses in efficiency even under the perfect scenario with no startup time. So if you want to emphasize getting projects completed, multi-tasking must go. This is an operations management mindset, though it runs against much current practice.

The points about efficiency are similarly misguided. You don't focus on worker efficiency, operations points you at throughput and global optimization rather than local optimization.

Those however are about focusing on improvements and operations of the current systems. It is true that innovation is different than operations. In the same way that learning to program efficiently in a language is different than inventing a programming language. They are different kinds of things. Many operations principles however can be successfully applied to innovation. For an excellent read on the topic, read "The Principles of Product Development Flow" by Reinertsen.

To get a better understanding of operations in general, and not the hyperbole advanced in the article a good starting place is "The Goal" by Goldratt.

One big revelation I learned while studying operations is that the things that largely drive developers crazy aren't good management practices. They aren't advanced by operations researchers. They are in fact what I always thought they were, bad management practices.

This is sad. Back in school we had to read "The Goal", about how a new manager is able to turn around a dying manufacturing plant and save it from closure, by focusing on "the goal", namely profit.

Sorry darlings but saving the planet is not "the goal". Profit, and only profit is. KP is going to have to learn this the hard way evidently.

Congrats on the transition! I have several books to recommend that I all read are on my bookshelf, some with reviews[1]. YMMV vary but these were the most helpful for me:

1. The First 90 Days - a good reminder that when you transition, it's like starting a new job

2. Become and Effective Software Engineering Manager - a hands-on book for people transitioning to management, starting at a new company or looking to make more of an org-wide impact.

3. The Manager's Path - a short reference handbook for managers at all levels.

4. The Goal - written in the '80s, yet a timeless novel on what management is about, may that be a manager of a team, an organization or an industrial plant.

Also, I wrote a post about my learnings on transitioning from engineer to manager that has some good comments on HN[2]

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/my-reading-list/#engineer...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326652

Eli Goldratt's The Goal popularized two main ideas. Theory of constraints and transition from production to services (subscriptions, or both).

Many, many have tried to transition to services. Amazon figured it out.

I was totally invested in Sun's grid computing vision, so I was very slow to recognize AWS. We already had VMs on servers and I couldn't wrap my head around virtualizing everything. It just seemed like so much monkey motion (too much work).

Even so, AWS is slowly, painfully recreating grid computing. By bundling up those services. But unlike Sun, AWS found an incremental path, with many, many ways to monetize along the way.

I had to read "The Goal" for Operations Management, which I think is pretty standard for all Operations courses.

I found the portions of the book dealing with the relationship between the husband and wife to be a little trite, but I can see how it might appeal to some to break up the monotony of teaching theory of constraints (TOC), even if the TOC parts are still presented using a fictional narrative.

The book is a quick, interesting, and informative enough read to make it a must-read for anything interested in business books. For most people, I'm sure they'd rather read this than dig into more research and academic-based papers on TOC.

I haven't read any of his other books but will likely look into them in the near future.

I've had a hard time with GEB too. Tried a few times. I felt ashamed because my progress was more in the tens than over a hundred.

Writing style is important for me too. I can complete a narrative, story-style book in 2 days. I can't complete a non-fiction book in that time that's half the size. My favourite books are ones that set out to teach something practical in the form of a story (like The Goal).

I have finished non-fiction books. They tend to be fast paced and immediate with what I want out of them. To the point.

In general, that fits with the ADHD type i.e cut the bullshit and get the point!

I'm reading some of the books here in the comments. Last two weeks I finished the books:

The Phoenix project

The goal

High output management

These were insanely good. I actually bought some of these to my three siblings.

I'd recommend these books because these books opened my eyes on how management can really help if done right

In the case of the Phoenix project, you may be misattributing what were references to Goldratt’s The Goal (almost certainly if the book is outside the technology space). Really the reference is to the underlying model, Theory of Constraints in that case. Could be happening for other examples where the book/author isn’t the primary reference.

The Goal by Eliyaho Goldratt

Long time coming.

I read The Goal and its sequels in the early 90s. The struggling fictional businesses were turned around by transitioning from production towards service oriented business models. Very out of the box thinking at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

I really enjoyed the books at the time. Not great literature. But very thought provoking.

The author is describing the time value of money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money

The reason to to take the money now from venture is because it is more valuable now than it is later. The way this author is describing this though reminds me of the folksy, whimsical way some business books are written which makes this article so applealing: e.g. The Goal, How to Win friends and influence people, etc.

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

Even though "The Goal" is a story about process improvement for a factory, I've also used the thinking from it (basically, lean manufacturing) for software development.

Daniel Jarjoura recently published a fairly complete reading list that might be useful: https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-rea...

Some books I’ve read and enjoyed and/or found useful: The hard thing about hard things, the innovator’s dilemma, High output management, Accelerate, The Phoenix project (though I much prefer The Goal)

The Goal - Eliyahu Goldratt

I've been teaching some folks how to code. It's helped a bit. I also have been reading more business books - things like the personal MBA [1], The Goal, how to win friends and influence people (old versions before he died). Basically, make an effort to speak their language, because they (probably) won't put in the effort to learn yours. Some will appreciate the effort and meet you half-way, others will be amazed that you can communicate with them.

[1] : http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-Master-Art-Business/dp/15...

"The Art of Profitability" by Adrian Slywotzky

"The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan

"Fanatical Prospecting" by Jeb Blount

"Fooling Some of the People All of the Time" by David Einhorn

"Confidence Game" by Christine Richard

"Mouth Matters; How Your Mouth Ages Your Body and What YOU Can Do About It" by Carol Vander Stoep

"Adventures in Stochastic Processes" by Sidney & Resnick

"The Great Deformation" by David Stockman

"Efficient Electrical Systems Design Handbook" by Thumann & Franz

"The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt

"Notes on Discrete Mathematics" by Miguel Lerma

"Stochastic Calculus with Infinitesimals" by Frederik S. Herzberg

"Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" by David Mackay

"Coming Apart" by Charles Murray

"The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter

"In Other Words: The Science And Psychology Of Second-language Acquisition" by Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta

The Goal also inspired my favourite tech business book, The Phoenix Project[1]. As in The Goal, the protagonist has a mentor who asks pointed questions that are the slow-burning fuse which later unlock understanding. Easy to read, wise, and useful at work. I've caused at least ten people around me to read it, and they've all been grateful.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...

Construction and manufacturing are usually about cookie cutter replicas, with log degrees of customisation. There isn't a feedback loop in the manufacturing line to product development once you have a stable product.

This is roughly analogous to corporate IT operations. There's a set of standard services which everyone uses, and there's no innovation on the desktop by most users.

On the other hand, with software and R&D, the feedback loops are primary drivers of generating information (and value). This is why so many of us preach about "testing in production" for web services.

The core of these two philosophies is pretty much summarised by two books:
The Goal, by E. Goldratt (ISBN: 9780884271956 ).
The Principles of Product Development Flow, by D. Reinertsen (ISBN: 9781935401001).

i disagree, it isn't gobbledygook. it's not necessarily a great analogy but the underlying idea that the analogy is trying to help you remember and communicate is a reasonable and useful one:

> When evaluating past decisions or thinking about making new ones, a useful analogy to use is the flipping of the highest-order bit.

> aim to identify and flip the highest order bit because if you don't, you're not going to be able to make up for it by flipping everything else.

Other ways of trying to remember and communicate a similar idea could the "80 / 20 rule" -- e.g. small subset of effort/population/whatever often contributes disproportionately to some output.

Theory of Constraints / Eli Goldratt's book "The Goal" is another bunch of related concepts. Decide on what your big picture objective is, investigate and analyse the system to discover what the main bottleneck is. Focus on removing that bottleneck.

I find that re-reading the books help. For instance, it wasn’t until my 3rd read of The Goal that I felt as if I completely understood the underlying themes.

As others mentioned, being able to relate to the content of the book helps immensely. For instance when reading The Innovator’s Dilemma I kept finding parallels to my previous industry and company. This struck me so much that I can list most of the content of the book simply by thinking back to those insights.

As a last note, non-fiction books are seldom gripping. Reading a few pages before going to sleep doesn’t cut it for me, words zip past my eyeballs without hitting the brain. I need to actively focus on the content, much more so than when reading fiction. I try to force myself to pause and actively think about the content every few paragraphs: does it make sense? Can I follow the logic of the argument? Does it resonate with my experience? It’s the only way for me to actually get anything lasting out of the book.

"The Goal" - Started my interest in Lean principles, along with how to apply them to programming - imagining my programs as little data "factories", that need to be made efficient and efficiently.

"How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" - Taught me I don't need to follow the standard path that "everyone else does", and to focus on how I can actively change my world - instead of waiting for someone else to to change it for me.

"Code Complete" - Get it. Read it. Live it.

When I got my first managerial role in a software organization, my boss told me to read The Goal. I was really turned off by the fake family narrative aspect. I skimmed it, trying to pick out the practical business parts. I was already aware of Agile and continuous improvement / Kaizen, and physical manufacturing had nothing to do with my job, so "Theory of Constraints" didn't speak to me much.

Also, the cover just reeks of business-book BS (http://www.amazon.com/*/dp/0884270610)

When I finished the book, my boss asked me what I thought. I told him I didn't like it, and he laughed and told me it was awful. I shut my mouth instead of asking me why he recommended the book in the first place.

That was my first introduction to management BS.

For OR, and manufacturing in general, and when the book was written in the early 1990s when these ideas were newer and we didn't have the Internet for disseminating information, The Goal and TOC were probably more valuable to the contemporary audience.

These are mine lines of thought as well, although I feel positive (non-rationally, I guess) about how this can develop in the future.
There is just this step of the way where I want to establish a common vocabulary and structure on which we can then build. I've already seen in conversations the will for that and there is a precedent in the opposite direction with some books about manufacturing - The Goal and The Toyota Way - which was very constructive to how we talk about things.

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is pretty good. It is a business fiction book, so although it is not about startups, it applies well to start ups.
http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08...

The book explains Theory of Constraints(TOC) in a novel. TOC is basically similar to profiling software, but instead of software, you profile a business. Find the bottlenecks in the system and work on them. Improving other things has very low return, and usually just waste of time. Improving bottlenecks improves the throughput of the whole system.

Here are my other recommended business fiction books:
http://atank.interlogy.com/blog/?p=15

Thank you for posting this. I, too, read The Goal for Ops Mgmt and appreciated it, but not nearly as much as I do after 6 years back in the Real World. I've headed back to Amazon and have purchased The Goal (and a bunch of his other books, too), excited to read them with fresh eyes.

A moment I should notice: I'd underestimated the value of Goldratt (or B-school's professor hadn't hammered it home) and now he's gone. Fortunately, his books are still available.

> (like "The Goal"...These last two books are classics dealing with physical production.

The Phoenix Project is a 2013 IT/DevOps version of The Goal [0]. It's an easy read that would be a complementary follow up to The Goal. It would help in understanding principles from The Goal outside of physical production.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...