Book review: Management 3.0

"Management 3.0" is written by Jurgen Appelo, a dutch author with an active blog.

If you take a look at the blog, you'll understand where the book came from, most of the content covered in the book is on the blog in some form or other.

So, what is the advantage of the book over the blog? Well Jurgen introduces his 6 views on management and gathers/aggregates his blog entries under these 6 views, splitting each view into a chapter on theory and a chapter on practice.

The book succeeds in presenting alot of information, from a wide variety of disciplines such as chaos theory and agile. Quite often Jurgen gathers existing models and combines/modifies them to build his own model. Generally the thinking is good and gives some new insights.

I found the book hard to get through at times (and in fact I didn't quite finish it). There isn't that much of a "story" in it, and I find it could profit from some more real life examples to spruce it up. I do think it makes a great reference. If you ever find yourself wondering about this or that model, and how it all fits together with agile/leadership/managemment, then this book is a good book to pick up and flip to the relevant pages.

Delegation checklist

The following useful delegation checklist inspired on a similar checklist in the book "Management 3.0" by Jurgen Appelo (which I'm currently reading):

- are you delegating a discrete chunk of work? Is the work delegable at all?
- delegate to a person, or to a team? Explain why you are delegating to them.
- how much responsibility do you delegate? From "do it like this" to "do it anyway you want", with "let's work this out together" somewhere in between
- is the person(s) Aware of the problem or goal? Explain the why.
- does the person(s) have the Desire to carry out the task?
- does the person(s) have the Ability to carry out the task? Think skills, experience, but also tools and documentation etc.
- does the person(s) know when successfull? How are results demoed and how often. How is progress tracked?
- are budget, scope, time, and quality constraints clear?
- who is the problem/product/bsuiness owner to help out and answer questions?

When things do not work out as planned, don't shout at your team, find the item on the checklist you forgot (or add a new item to the checklist)!

A shorter version of the above is: is your delegated task SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, timebounded).

Book review: Switch, a great book about change.

Change is hard. Why? Because people resist change. Well this book is the answer. It provides a simple framework for achieving change, a recipe for change if you will.

There are basically three main parts the book focuses on: the rational mind, the emotional side, and the environment around us. For each part, three key criteria are defined that need to be dealt with to achieve change successfully.

Luckily, it's not all theory or psycho babble. The book is filled with great motivational examples of real life change, each illustrating one or more key criteria at work. This makes teh book a joy to read.

All in all, it's a must read for anybody interested in change, for example anybody in a leadership or management role within an organization.