"The Score takes Care of Itself"
- Bill Walsh

Jack Dorsey talked about it in Startup School and I highly recommend it as well.

My top priority books:

    Software Requirements - Karl Wiegers

    Programming TypeScript - Boris Cherny

    Associate Cloud Engineer Study - Dan Sullivan

    Design Patterns - Gang of Four

    Refactoring - Kent Beck, Martin Fowler

    Programming Pearls - Jon Bentley

    Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler

    The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas, Andrew Hunt

    CSS: The Definitive Guide - Eric A. Meyer, Estelle Weyl

    Working Effectively with Legacy Code - Michael Feathers

    Head First Design Patterns - Eric Freeman, Bert Bates

    Code Complete - Steve McConnell

    Peopleware - Tim Lister, Tom DeMarco

    Clean Code - Robert C. Martin

    The Clean Coder - Robert C. Martin

    Clean Architecture - Robert C. Martin

    Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

    Functional Design Patterns for Express.js - Jonathan Lee Martin

    The Surrender Experiment - Michael A. Singer

The best books I've ever read:

    Principles - Ray Dalio

    The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

    The Effective Executive - Peter F. Drucker

    Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill

    Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

    Influence - Robert B. Cialdini

    The Startup Way - Eric Ries

    The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

    12 Rules for Life - Jordan B. Peterson

    Measure What Matters - John Doerr, Larry Page

    The Fish That Ate the Whale - Rich Cohen

    The E-Myth Revisited - Michael E. Gerber

    The Score Takes Care of Itself - Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh

    Management - Peter F. Drucker

    Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows

    Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

Really interesting post, thanks! You mentioned a few recommended readings (High Output Management, The Score Takes Care of Itself), which are all great general management books. Have you noticed much divergence from their advice when specifically applied to engineering management at high-growth startups?

This is why it's important to have passions outside of those that pay the bills. And, if your passions and finances are entangled, which is the goal for most, it's important to build structures that allow times of absolute creativity (time in the goalless path). A writer still must spend time editing his work, which is a different process than creating. So, if you have profit in the back of your mind throughout the process, as the essay notes, you will stifle yourself. If you have an editing process, where you line up your creative expressions with profit, you're basically doing what a writer does when he edits.

Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself is a fun book that, as the title suggests, deals with this idea.

I give these three books out to new managers in my org:

* High Output Management by Andy Grove https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679762884/

* Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591846404/

* The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843472/

For interns I give out these two books:

* The Pragmatic Programmer https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Maste...

* The Passionate Programmer https://pragprog.com/book/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer

iyn,

Author here. Thanks! That's a great suggestion. As you can tell, right now the site and the mailing list is the most minimal of an implementation. We want to build a network, connect and mentor one another through the simplest and easiest mechanism possible - email. Once we have a medium-sized community with dozens of experts, we plan to add community managed content. Perhaps through a wiki?

I'll share the books and articles that have positively affected my career. These aren't tried and true and maybe dozens of people would disagree about their value but here they are, for what they are worth:

Management:

  - High output management (Grove, 1995)
  - Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Useem)
  - It’s your Ship  (Abrashoff)
  - The score takes care of itself  (Walsh)
  - The Hard Thing About Hard Things  (Horowitz)
  - Where good ideas come from  (Johnson)
  - Extreme Ownership (Navy Seals) — (Willink)
  - Work Rules — (Bock)
  - 5 Dysfunctions of a team — (Lencioni)
  - Give and Take (Grant)
  - This is what impactful Engineering leadership looks like - http://firstround.com/review/this-is-what-impactful-engineering-leadership-looks-like/
  - Notes on startup engineering management for young bloods - http://www.elidedbranches.com/2015/10/notes-on-startup-engineering-management.html?m=1

Engineering:

  - Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Duval, Matyas, Glover, 2007)
  - Continuous Delivery: Release Software Releases through Build, Test and Deployment Automation (Humble, Farley, 2010)
  - Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series) (Beck, Andres)
  - SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  - Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  - Refactoring Databases - Evolutionary Database Design (Ambler, Sadalage, 2006)

I am always puzzled at how "high brow" people scoff at sports. There is so much to learn from athletes. MJ, Kobe, Tom Brady -- these guys have all the skill in the world, but more impressive than their skill is their incredible work ethic. I feel there's a lot to learn here.

For example, one of Kobe's conditioning trainer's had this to say:

"When I arrived and opened the room to the main practice floor I saw Kobe. Alone. He was drenched in sweat as if he had just taken a swim. It wasn’t even 5AM.

We did some conditioning work for the next hour and fifteen minutes. Then we entered the weight room, where he would do a multitude of strength training exercises for the next 45 minutes. After that we parted ways and he went back to the practice floor to shoot. I went back to the hotel and crashed. Wow."

Later on, around 11AM, the trainer sees Kobe on the court, practicing with the USA Olympic Squad, and has this conversation:

"So when did you finish?"

"Finish what?"

"Getting your shots up. What time did you leave the facility?"

"Oh just now. I wanted 800 makes so yeah, just now."

...

This is not unique to Kobe, you find stories like this with all athletes in conversation for "greatest of all time."

Secondly, there's a lot to learn from coaches as well, especially from the perspective of a startup founder. There's a reason Keith Rabois brought up the Bill Walsh's (SF 49ers coach) book, "The Score Takes Care of Itself," in the HTSAS lecture series.

Lastly, watching sports at a high level is like appreciating great art. A great backhand in tennis, a brilliant pass by a quarterback, these all have a quality of beauty about them. I feel they induce similar awe-inspiring feelings one might find in an art museum, a great music album, etc.

My discipline comes from a lifetime of sports and has carried over to my work life (even though I now do martial arts as a hobbyist instead of competing as a college athlete); many of these can be read as workout / health points but are actually applicable across your life.

It starts from the long-term goal: if you want to be extraordinary, you need to do things differently than the ordinary. People are going to give you a hard time about some of the changes you're making, so you need to be ready to ignore them and accept the fact that if you want to have a different level of discipline than others you need to do things differently.

Discipline is compound interest in your life - you are doing the little things the right way every day, and all those pennies are eventually going to add up into millions. This applies to food, working out, pushing on projects, learning new skills etc.

The best advice is to make it easy for yourself - pick a FEW, SIMPLE, things that you can control and start from there. Stop eating the same snack or having a glass of wine after work. Start waking up at 6 am. Then evolve to going to the gym from there. Build habits.

You also need to accept that you're not perfect, and no man is an island. This part was the hardest for me - I built up walls around myself (thinking that I needed to keep my habits exactly as they were since they had gotten me this far) and thus cut off opportunities and other people. Eventually I was able to be a bit more chilled out while still keeping the discipline in the right areas. I found that 7 habits of highly successful people really helped me; I also recommend "Wooden on Leadership" and "The Score Takes Care of Itself" as examples of champions putting this bottoms-up approach into practice over years and reaping the rewards.

There is no shortcut. There is nothing fancy. Control what you can control, don't worry about the rest of it, and trust in the process. Feel free to message me if I can be helpful

[0] The Score Takes Care of Itself.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp...

I had a colleague who insisted on quality in every bit of our software and the results were similar perhaps: locally, each thing might take more time and more care, but the global result was everything working better and being done more easily. So perhaps focusing in quality and assuming efficiency will come from global effects is a good strategy?

(Reminds me also of The score takes care of itself business book)

"The Score Takes Care of Itself" by Bill Walsh: http://www.amazon.com/The-Score-Takes-Care-Itself/dp/1591843...

Jack Dorsey recommended this title at Startup School 2013 and I got around to reading it in 2014. It's also one of the readings for YC's "How to Start a Startup" class: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/lists/readings/

I didn't think the leadership notes from a highly successful NFL (American professional football) coach would have much application in the world of technology, but Walsh's insights and discipline can be applied to many different fields. It's changed the way I work as I lead teams and I realize I have a lot more to learn and apply in my day-to-day duties.

"The Score Takes Care of Itself" does get a bit behind-the-scenes in the football world, but if the reader is willing to get past those parts, or better, learn the lessons in some of the stories, there is a lot to be gained.

I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. Points pulled from real experience. For me, this adds context and makes a book readable. If you don't learn anything, then at least you might get to read a good story.

The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz

The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach)

Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar)

To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull)

Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace the "lineage" to see where the starting points were. The trash today won't be a thing 50 years from now. So, maybe look at books from 50 years ago or more.

I read about half of "The Score Takes Care Of Itself" by Bill Walsh on a flight a few weeks back, and it makes me question your reasoning.

It sounded like the team that Bill Walsh coached was playing an (at the time) similarly unloved playing style, and didn't have the favored players in the NFL (especially before the winning began), but (supposedly, I don't know anything about NFL) Joe Montana is now seen as one of the best quarterbacks, despite not being well suited to other teams' strategies.

In that sense the full court press sounds like a similar strategy to the west coast offence where you can take what are otherwise seen as poor players and transform a sport by taking championships.

Bill Walsh - The Score Takes Care of Itself

> To accomplish this, I decided to fly to New York to hole up in a hotel room for three days to read a few highly-recommended management books.

> I decided to focus on growing Gusto’s engineering team, and not our code. The technical books on my desk starting getting replaced with books like Mindset, High Output Management, and The Score Takes Care of Itself — still three of my favorites today.

If the three books listed in the latter excerpt were not those three books you read in the hotel, can you please tell us what books they were?