Book: Small Things Done Well

By Michael Lopp

Decades of Engineering Leadership wisdom packed into short, easy to understand, and well written chapters.

It felt unnecessary to divide the book in three acts (manager, director, executive). I enjoyed the whole book but the stories on act one seemed a bit better constructured.

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"management is fundamentally about uncovering information - roadblocks your team is facing, interpersonal friction, etc. - and then slicing through the BS to find athe right way forward."

"This is a book full of small things. Simple, memorable leadership acts and practices."

"you can't hack leadership."

"One of the primary reasons there are no noteworthy university degrees in leadership is because leadership is a set of skills you must learn from the job."

"Pick a small thing, practice it for three months, and discover for yourself how it will make you a better leader."

"Leaders set the bar for what is and is not acceptable on their teams. They define this bar both overtly with the words they say, and more subtly with their actions. There are two scenarios that may play out when you've reached Meeting Blur: either you don't change anything and do all of your work poorly, or you drop some of that work, which equates to a missed commitment. While the optics on both scenarios are bad, what is worse is that by choosing either course you signal to your team that these obvious bad outcomes are acceptable."

"Let others share their thoughts. You never know when a great idea will appear. Understand that because you're the leader, your team is going to be less likely to contract your idea - which is another good reason to act last. [...] Demonstrate respect to the team by asking great questions. Be curious. Your experience has taught you lessons, and your questions often share those lessons better than your lectures."

"leadership is equal parts following a well-defined set of principles and making split-second decisions in the heat of battle with little to no factual information."

"Career plan? Isn't that you manager's job? Yeah, kinda. But the problem with leaving it up to your manager is that they're only going to be there for two or three years and you are you for, like, forever. You are the most informed person regarding your career plans, which means both your analysis [...] and your decision [... is] critical"

"Half-delegation is the act of fiving others the work, but not full control or context."

"As the heart of each small thing [above] is the same essential leadership binding agent: trust."

"accountability requires a wilingness or obligation to justify (account for) actions and decisions [...] This meanswhen it goes sideways and everyone's staring at you, you need to be able to eplain both how you got there and what is going to be done to fix it."

"'What do [managers] do all day? [good managers] are giving away just about everything that lands on their plate to members of their team because their job isn't building the product, their job is building a team that is capable of building the product."

"in the absence of information, humans fill the gap with the worst possible version of the truth, usually reflecting their worst fears."

Starting agenda for a staff meeting

"rules that define a good [video] game:"

"my definition of a compliment: a selfless, well-articulated, and timely recognition of achievement. [... a] compliment specifically documents the act, the value, and the impact."

"managers tell you where you are. Leaders, all leaders, tell you where you're going"

"a productive team knows itself. The team members know each other's names, and they understand and appreciate each other's respective strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. They are not strangers."

"[when you join a company as employee ~100] most everyone is going to talk about how to bulild the culture, but the vast majority of the culture has already been built. No matter how many times a group of well-intentioned humans plasters a new set of values on the wall, the culture will not signiticantly change while the founding team is running the company."

"stories are culture [...] a core set of humans in the building retold the stories that mattered to them, over and over again, slowly carving a well-defined path in the consciousness of the company."

"If applied Flow is directing the creative process, Anti-Flow is about lack of direction to achieve an even more ambitiously creative end."

"Rumors are a function of culture. Rather than stress uselessly about the source of the rumor or how it propagated, start by taking the time to reflect: What possible truth could be contained within the rumor? What unanswered question is the rumor trying to answer?"

"there is a win inside each failure, because within each one there are discoverable lessons."

"managers are forever chasing the high associated with the Zone, but rarely achieve it because their job responsibilities directly contradict the requirements to get there. [...] You would not believe how many times your boss has walked into a meeting with absolutely no clue what is supposed to happen during that meeting. Managers have develop agressive context acquisition skills. They walk into the room and immediately assess whose meeting it is, then listen intensely for the first five minutes to figure out why they're all there while sporting a well-rehearsed facial expression that conveys to the entire room, 'Yes, yes, I centainly know what is going on here.'"

Since Feb he has blocked one hour every days, even weekends, to build something.

"'Feedback is a gift.' The pharse is designed to remove the fear of receiving critical feedback [...] another interpretation [...] feedback isn't just that you receive the gift, you also need to unwrap (or unpack) it."

"[Find a mentor] You need insiders. High-bandwidth insiders who know the entire story. You need them for the same reasons you need a diverse team. Different prespectives create well-informed debate, which allows for better decisions."