High Output Management was an interesting read. Grove took timeless computer architecture techniques and mapped it onto management.

Well I'm not American and I read mostly "self-help" books, from "In Search of Meaning" to "Code Complete" to "Extreme Ownership" to "High Output Management" to "Never Split The Difference". I always read one before I go to sleep.

i’m not sure where i stole this from.

my best guess is a combo of the following books / leaders.

1. High output management (andy grove of intel fame)

2. Charlie Munger’s Psychology of Human Misjudgment

3. Ben Franklin autobiography

I would not recommend anyone An Elegant Puzzle. No disrespect to the author's writing ability and no discredit to his experience. I thought the book had no flow (it was a curated collection of his blog posts, or something like that). He described in detail the decisions he made or things he learned but since he didn't explain any context about the company at the time I could not figure out how any of it was relevant to me. And I've worked everywhere in companies of varying size between F500 and Series A.

I do agree The Manager's Path is a good one though.

Some other favorites are High Output Management by Andy Grove, Managing Transitions by William Bridges, The Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, The Innovator's Dilemma, etc.

This was a nice succinct writeup. On the topic, here are some books I'd recommend for ICs making the jump to a manager role (or thinking about it):

1. The Making of a Manager (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Manager-What-Everyone-Looks-eb...)

2. The Manager's Path (https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Grow...)

3. Crucial Conversations (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-...)

4. The Coaching Habit (https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Habit-Less-Change-Forever-eb...)

5. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Len...)

I'm still due to read High Output Management (https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove-e...) and Extreme Ownership (https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-eboo...).

What is an OKR – Objective and Key Result?
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are a goal-setting method businesses use to encourage development, innovation, and creativity by setting measurable goals and tracking progress.

Andy Grove, Intel’s co-founder and former CEO, was the first to implement OKRs for attaining the company’s objectives. Setting milestones was important for Intel since a large corporation needed to transform strategic thought into attainable goals and benchmarks.

In his book High Output Management, Grove stressed the necessity of tying key results to goals. Grove believes that OKRs indicate whether or not a company has fulfilled its aims.

OKR in software development, as an endpoint architecture, assisted Larry Page and Sergey Brin in accelerating Google to greater heights, and hundreds of businesses have subsequently learned to harness the OKR process’s principles.

Emerging technologies like FinTech and PropTech have continuously employed goal-setting techniques to discover major advancements in their development processes. Advances in behavioral biometrics in FinTech, for example, are the outcome of a series of procedures that resulted in a sophisticated increase in cybersecurity. These OKR examples for software developers highlight its significance in today’s fast-changing times.

But there’s another frequently-used and probably more familiar acronym in software development – KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. Both set goals and track progress. So are they interchangeable?

Try reading High Output Management by Andy Grove. He built many of the processes at Intel and his book is guide and a narrative on how he did it. The principles are now commonplace in many companies but no one tells you how they came about —- this book helped me figure out how management worked in a large company when I started at one years ago and gave a behind the scenes look which was helpful for me to decipher my experiences.

At the very least, reading this book is a way to pick the brain of one of the most brilliant managerial minds of our time (he passed away a few years ago). It’s usually hard to find good mentors in any company, so reading books is one way to get mentored by someone outside the company.

* Fooled By Randomness (NN Taleb): Taleb is a complicated personality, but this book gave me a heuristic for thinking about long-tails and uncertain events that I could never have derived myself from a probability textbook.

* Designing Data Intensive Applications (M Kleppmann): Provided a first-principles approach for thinking about the design of modern large-scale data infrastructure. It's not just about assembling different technologies -- there are principles behind how data moves and transforms that transcend current technology, and DDIA is an articulation of those principles. After reading this, I began to notice general patterns in data infrastructure, which helped me quickly grasp how new technologies worked. (most are variations on the same principles)

* Introduction to Statistical Learning (James et al) and Applied Predictive Modeling (Kuhn et al). These two books gave me a grand sweep of predictive modeling methods pre-deep learning, methods which continue to be useful and applicable to a wider variety of problem contexts than AI/Deep Learning. (neural networks aren't appropriate for huge classes of problems)

* High Output Management (A Grove): oft-recommended book by former Intel CEO Andy Grove on how middle management in large corporations actually works, from promotions to meetings (as a unit of work). This was my guide to interpreting my experiences when I joined a large corporation and boy was it accurate. It gave me a language and a framework for thinking about what was happening around me. I heard this was 1 of 2 books Tobi Luetke read to understand management when he went from being a technical person to CEO of Shopify. (the other book being Cialdini's Influence). Hard Things about Hard Things (B Horowitz) is a different take that is also worth a read to understand the hidden--but intentional--managerial design of a modern tech company. These some of the very few books written by practitioners--rather than management gurus--that I've found to track pretty closely with my own real life experiences.

I've been working/managing remote for 15-20 years. I agree with the posters, that the skills which make a manager successful can be executed remotely as well as in person.

Buy "High Output Management" by Andy Grove. Read it. I've read it cover to cover 6 times now and still find gold each time I review it.

It is hard to know everything about your situation from you post, but your more emphasized issue is you seem to be missing a 'real connection to real humans'. Yes, of course a manager needs to be connected to the team, and that empathy/earned respect is essential.... but it can be built using remote means as well as in person. You show respect through words and actions, those can be written as well as spoken. Maybe you personally put a lot of emphasis on the immediate feedback of face to face to feel that connection? Truth is, while that immediate feedback feels great and helps you tune your message, it isn't the foundation. The foundation is the thing you are getting the feedback on.

If the message is "Team, here is the goal for the week and why it matters", the foundation is that each person sees the goal and how their effort contributes to it. It is great when everyone high-fives around the room, but high-fives without the understanding are a false signal.

You are correct that managers are essential to building a winning team. You probably have a list of what roles/jobs/tasks a manager does to achieve this.

You could write down that list, and for each item write your current process for achieving it. You could then think about how you can map that process to a remote work framework.