
The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read - zwischenzug
https://zwischenzugs.com/2019/11/27/the-first-non-bullshit-book-about-culture-ive-read/
======
nogabebop23
My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV):

1\. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because
I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about
interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy",
each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot
differentiate but we front-line managers need to figure out how to position
and leverage individuals.

2\. Actually, genuinely, caring about your direct reports goes a very long way
towards solving a lot of culture problems but...

3\. Dev Managers need to put a lot of effort out into their teams to drive
change and it is often (most of the time?) not returned. Your biggest enemy is
not active sabotage, it's apathy at all levels of the organization. I started
pushing for some specific cultural-ish changes about this time last year and,
while I was given passive approval & support and lots of latitude to make
change, it has been physically exhausting. If I was in an organization that
didn't even give me this much freedom it would have been exhausting and
pointless.

4\. A Dev Manager can make localized changes when not all teams want or can
reciprocate, but I'm not convinced yet that the requisite firewalls you need
to erect aren't ultimately harmful in the long run. It is a very delicate
balance.

In the end my take-away is you need space and time to make any meaningful
change, and even that is limited by the crushing inertia of the organization.
For me personally it has been physically consuming and I have 6 month & 1 year
goals, plus an overall 3-year plan that I'll either complete in the coming
year or look for an new opportunity elsewhere.

~~~
darkerside
A few thoughts.

If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go
instead of Checkers.

One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding
sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift
followed by burnout and stasis.

~~~
proc0
I actually think current "leadership" is on its way to being extinct. It will
be replaced by algorithms and best practices, along with better tools. If
you're not contributing to code, there will be very little room for them in
the software company of the future. The concepts that non-technical leaders
have to learn are trivial compared to the advanced techniques of software
development.

~~~
henrikschroder
If leading people is so goddamn easy compared to software engineering, why do
so few engineers want to move into people leadership, and why do so many of
them absolutely suck at it?

I think you are severely discounting the skills it takes to lead people, and
you are also making an extremely optimistic assumption that companies in the
future somehow would be magically more meritocratic than existing companies,
when there's no evidence of the sort. On the contrary, people with great
interpersonal skills will continue to advance off of the labour of the people
with only great technical skill.

Your glorious engineer's revolution will probably not come to pass if history
is any indication.

~~~
proc0
Maybe I should have clarified, but leadership will have to be an additional
requirement on top of knowing how to develop. If you look at the history of
software development in enterprise, software developers have increasingly had
to work multiple overlapping roles, the more recent of which, in my
experience, is making developers be testers as well. It used be QA was a
separate role, but now it has evaporated because there are so many tools
surrounding this discipline that require knowing how to code, so exclusive
testing roles are not favored as much anymore. I don't how many years from now
this is, but I really believe that everyone will have to know how to code to a
great extent in order to use the software tools of the discipline.

~~~
henrikschroder
If you look at the history of software development in enterprise, somehow,
engineers never seem to be rewarded according to their actual contribution to
the bottom line.

Somehow, the managerial class and the investor class insert themselves between
the fruits of the labour and the engineers performing said labour. And if you
think that's suddenly going to stop because the nature of the labour changes,
then I think you're mistaken.

Enterprise structures rewards rent-seekers, because they are built by, and
controlled by rent-seekers, utilizing disposable labour. The only way a power
structure like that can be flipped, is through revolution. Or by forming your
own company, out-competing these enterprises.

------
DanielBMarkham
This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the
book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the
years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a
hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off.

I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books,
especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having
gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet
books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking
about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book.

Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on
culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and
measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in
3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't.

For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets
of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a
bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of
anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of
the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before.

This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give
up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you
do so.

~~~
auto
> then a slow die-off until the next book.

I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps
more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or
whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things.

What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of
literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done,
and more like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect
to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you
get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat.

I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own
personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success
tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Like you describe, I just kept sucking it all in, consuming as much as I
could. I have self-taught through a few of these subjects. I don't have an
answer for you, but I have an answer for me. Perhaps sharing my answer might
help you too. I hope so.

These are unsolved problems, that's why the material keeps getting produced. I
think if you can find inspiration or a good "nutritional meal" to last for a
while, it's a good thing. If nothing else, it serves to motivate. That's a big
plus.

I'm pretty dense and hard-headed, so I have the hand-grenade theory of
teaching myself: I just keep lobbing book-after-book into my own ignorance
over time until I make progress. The vast majority of my attacks on my own
personal ignorance are ineffective in the long run, but you know what? Little
pieces here and there tend to stick. Maybe nobody's said it before or maybe it
just takes the right author in the right context to get to me. I suspect the
latter. After enough pieces stick, I can start actually working the problem of
making myself better.

People who want to help in areas like this (unsolved domains) will BS one
another in a heartbeat. I suspect that it's all so contextual to each of us
we're just not aware of what we're doing. I don't know. But it means that
personal recommendations of material should make you wary, especially if they
come with heavily-laden emotional terms. ("Fight the evil corporate management
structure!" or something like that) Like an organist that rests on the pedals
too much, you get a long ways with books like this by making them emotional.
Once again, motivation is great. If that's all you get, that's still a win for
many.

So now we get to the heart of it. The real problem is coming up with
_evaluation criteria_. Everything is great until there's a feedback loop and a
way to fail, so your long-term job in trying to learn is setting up faster
feedback loops and clear criteria to indicate success or failure. From there
you can begin sorting out the "good" parts of the material from the fluff.

But that's just me. Until I had a good, solid way of evaluating whether
something failed, a criteria that could point me to consuming smarter the next
time, I was just going meal-to-meal.

~~~
DenisM
An unsolicited advice that might cut your learning time in half:

 _Every book gives advice, every advice is an answer to a question. Ignore the
answer, but scrutinize the question._

For example: "embrace remote work, go remote-first even!" says one book,
"face-to-face is the only thing that works in the face of inevitable confusion
and complexity" says another. Not helpful, right? However, consider that the
first author got good result with remote work, and the second one got great
results in-office. The two may have had different circumstances which they
fail to describe for the reason you're describing the air you are breathing -
being very immersed in something makes that something invisible. So a question
to ponder then: under what circumstances is remote work possible, and if/how
can one modify those circumstances?

Scrutinizing the question is a lot more work than getting excited with the
first answer that came your way, but it's that much more likely to yield
applicable result on top of a bout of enthusiasm.

Also, thanks for [The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups]
suggestion.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I
think this makes me a consultant (smile)

Yes, it does boil down to questions. However questions drive out language, so
simply saying that "scrutinizing the question" is the real work is both true
and incomplete.

It is an important point, though. Thank you.

~~~
DenisM
> I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I
> think this makes me a consultant (smile)

It may or may not, naturally.

> questions drive out language

What do you mean by this?

------
mcguire
" _This makes me wonder whether a good way to make needed change as a leader
when there is no obvious crisis is to artificially create one so that people
get on board…_ "

Yes.

You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken.

As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this
conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just
continue floundering, wasting money and time. You have to wait until it's
completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me
to take it over?" and not have interference.

I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like
agent provocateur stuff.

~~~
nogabebop23
I don't intentional break things just to create crisis, but I have pushed for
change that I know highlights problems and forces us to address them. For
example, after many acquisitions by our company you could still identify the
old companies by the insular cultural characteristics of siloed product teams;
I pushed very hard to restructure teams and this required learning how to
cumminicate and collaborate with new people. Now we've acquired more companies
and (while in hindsight I guess I should have seen this coming) I'm learning
this is an ongoing challenge that I treated as a one-off project.

~~~
milesvp
It’s crazy how long mergers and aquisitions can be seen in IT infrastructure.
There are always little warts here and there, and if someone was around for it
they can say, oh yeah, we had to deal with such and such a team’s way of doing
things. And the naming, always you see random names of things that basically
no longer exist, but the names live on because some script names some report
based on a system that existed 10 years ago.

The archeology of IT systems is part of what I liked about supporting legacy
systems.

------
thatguy_2016
"Turn the ship around" is one of my favorite books too; most leadership books
follow the same formula- everything is broken, the consultant arrives with a
magic fix, and voila! Unicorns start flying.

"Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's
approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked
the approach.

A very honest, no BS book. Highly recommended

~~~
AdamM12
If you like that you should read "About Face" by David Hackworth. I have not
read it but I've hear about it via the Jocko Podcast.

~~~
lucianomt
I cannot recommend "About Face" enough. However it is a long read and covers
the whole life story of Colonel Hack.

Instead you might want to check out "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts" where he
focuses specifically on the time when he turned around the worst fighting
battalion in Vietnam.

~~~
AdamM12
Yeah heard that was good too. Thanks for the tip. I feel like that would give
you the real details that one would need to know for a situation like that.

------
netcan
To some extent, I'm no longer curious about "leadership" ideas about
organisational culture.

I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures
are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale.

Maybe motivation/attitudes can be improved and a naval hierarchy can work
better, but this is not the typical issue in corporate culture.

I'm curious about structural answers. A lot of culture comes down to how
success and failure work. If a company culture is bad at risk-taking and
internal entrepreneurship, a "culture of openness" can't fix it.

To get genuinely failure tolerant and opportunity seeking, organisations need
to structure for successes and failures.

How are resources really allocated in the company? How are successes and
failures really determined and what are the real ramifications.

So... (a) organisations need some formal/mechanical processes governing the
pertinent decisions: resources and goals. Formal processes can be examined
more honestly and biased to (or against) risk.

(b) If you really opportunity-seeking, risk taking culture... then you need
"money-where-mouth-is" mechanics. It doesn't need to be fully "market-based,"
but someone needs to be throwing themselves behind opportunities because they
think that they'll be successful.

The problem that runs through both Google (eg) and the naval ship is a culture
of "do enough, and no more." The solution is usually to raise the "enough" bar
somehow... motivation, discipline. That works when what you want from
employ/organisations is "enough."

If you want more than enough, I think the structure needs to change.

~~~
cushychicken
>I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational
cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at
scale.

I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with you - on the one hand, this statement
seems wrong, but on the other hand, everything else you said makes a ton of
sense to me.

Everyone seems so caught up by culture these days that they forget the other
big part of the leadership battle: _process_. Nobody on HN likes to hear it.
It's unsexy, and, to a creative type (like a designer, PM, or, to some extent,
SW engineer), threatening.

At the end of the day, though, people don't scale. _Processes_ do. I believe
good leadership has a lot to do with setting up good processes.

Edit: maybe I'm wrong, but _tons_ of companies humbleblog on HN about their
brilliant cultures. Very few of them open the kimono on their processes.
Largely, I think, because those are what really make their businesses money.

~~~
harimau777
How would you approach customizing the process to the individual or to a given
circumstance?

For example, I had a situation where I had a story to write functional tests
for a piece of our software. The story's scope had creeped (there turned out
to be disagreement between different levels of leadership over what the tests
should cover), but I had reached a point where I had implemented roughly 80%
of the tests that we needed. I submitted a pull request for the progress that
I had made so that it could be "locked in" and I could get it out of my mental
overhead. However, the person who reviewed the PR refused to merge it because
we apparently had a policy that each story could only have one PR. Ultimately,
the overhead of trying to get everything in all at once resulted in the story
not being successful.

Although maybe that example illustrates your point about the importance of
process, because I had been asking for weeks for us to actually have sprint
planning so that I could break up the story, but it kept getting canceled
because people felt that they were too busy.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
When people follow policies strictly to the exclusion of work getting done,
that's not something to be solved with another policy. In a well-functioning
environment, people are very willing (too willing, if you ask most security
teams!) to ignore or override annoying policies that stop things from getting
done. If people are working to rule, that's almost always a protest action,
and the only real solution is resolving the protesters' frustration.

------
goblin89
“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of
failure”.

Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in
fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity
resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity…

Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more
helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than
“X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing
trouble.)

It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless
statement.

~~~
ikurei
> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may
> in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where
> complexity resides[...]

I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is
the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach.

What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start
going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.

~~~
jcbrand
Even if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily
rule out complexity as the cause of failure.

It's a question of how far you zoom in or out.

In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while
on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it
causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).

------
walterkrankheit
All good points, although "rather than just punishing, he spent 8 hours
discussing with his team"...? There needs to be less punishment as methodology
out there, but an eight-hour discussion IS a form of punishment in my book.
And for everyone else, too.

~~~
zwischenzug
They discussed for 8 hours because they had to figure out how to avoid a
repeat in a practical way. The discussion was not with the offender, but among
the leadership team.

------
gregdoesit
This book has had the single biggest influence on how I motivate and lead
engineering teams[1]. It's an easy read, and the main thought on delegating
decisions down hold very well for software engineering, and on how to create a
culture of high-autonomy, high-performance.

[1] [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-
is-...](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-a-leader/)

------
artsyca
I've worked at all sorts of companies but it's actually been the same company
over and over it's the broken top down hierarchy mixed with control dramas and
disempowerment where initiative is punishable and the only way to get ahead is
to strike a deal with some kind of clique at the expense of the client

It's refreshing to know this book exists and I'll certainly look it up but I
have zero hope for so called corporate culture because it's lemmings all the
way down and lead follow or get out of the way is blocked by some callous know
it all opening their yawning pie hole to dish out googlisms

~~~
tensor
The problem is that many people believe "empowerment" means "do whatever the
fuck I want." At any company you are going to have objectives and goals, and
empowerment means getting the responsibility to make the hard trade offs
yourself.

It doesn't mean you can do something outside of the corporate goals, and it
doesn't mean you can just ignore some of the challenging parts of the job like
delivering a working product to customers in a timely fashion.

~~~
dkarl
The problem is theres's no natural distinction between "what" and "how." Every
aspect of how you do your job is meaningful in some way. You have to have a
good understanding with your boss about where you have discretion to follow
your judgment and where you don't.

~~~
tensor
That's probably one of the most important things a good boss can do: give
exactly that clarity. Define the lane you can run in, and point to the place
we want to get.

------
hughpeters
Here's the "Non-Bullshit Book on Culture" book this post discusses:

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L.
David Marquet

Also here's a great speech given by the David Marquet (with drawings!) on the
same topic:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8)

------
padraic7a
Is it very narrow minded of me to think that, even for HN, recognising
"culture" as "company culture" demonstrates a very blinkered view of the
world?

~~~
jen729w
I think it’s okay to recognise the shorthand and not feel bad about it. The
author of this article clearly doesn’t think he’s describing all culture. I
didn’t from the link title.

We’re humans, we cut corners. We all understand the intent.

~~~
nefitty
I didn't understand the poster's intent until I read some of these comments. I
thought the article was going to be about human culture in general.

------
caiocaiocaio
The fact that headline points out that it's not bullshit makes it sound like
bullshit.

When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good
indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking
for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of
backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and
had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?

~~~
icelancer
Well, we don't really have a choice in Seattle / SF; they hang those signs in
every restaurant.

~~~
therealdrag0
But the sign's content is chosen by external audit right? That's different.

------
itronitron
I had my hopes up, but this is about Team Culture (not Culture)

~~~
classified
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition #239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.

Also, exquisite irony serving up a "non-bullshit" book with the requisite
amount of bullshit to make up for it. After all, the total amount of bullshit
in the universe can never be reduced, only increased.

------
colechristensen
Does anyone have book suggestions on leadership and management which aren't
just pop-business BS?

~~~
jdsnape
I rate 'High output management' by Andrew Grove (founder & CEO of Intel). He
has clearly lived a lot of the experiences he wrote about and the advice was
pretty timeless.

~~~
jbc1
Review by Ben Horowitz:

[https://a16z.com/2015/11/13/high-output-
management/](https://a16z.com/2015/11/13/high-output-management/)

------
bluedino
This book explained a lot about a boss of mine. Ex-military, tried to run our
department like a battalion, took pride in "battlefield repairs" of code,
never let anyone think for themselves or contribute.

Only communicating through superiors...Micromanaging at its best, it was an
all-out terrible way of doing things.

------
tempsy
Wonder if anyone on here has read Ben Horowitz's latest book on culture "What
You Do Is Who You Are"?

I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over
the top so far...

~~~
trwhite
It's worth sticking with. Later on he draws more on some of his personal
experience (similar to THTAHT) and there are some hilarious anecdotes.

------
s_Hogg
wishfully, I read this as a "Book on the Culture". Does anyone know of such a
thing, aside from the actual Iain M Banks novels?

------
lha
I will definitely read this book. I recommend Leadership is Half The Story.

[https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership-
Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership-
Collaboration-
ebook/dp/B00T9Z29NS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=122I85SFS55J&keywords=leadership+is+half+the+story&qid=1575036651&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&sprefix=leadership+is+half%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1)

------
yannis7
as @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice
on historical / biographical books.

For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples
of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to
finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book)
-- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.

~~~
perl4ever
"primadonna scientists"

Feynman's shenanigans at Los Alamos are famous due to his memoirs, but at the
time, he was not an important person, was he? Is it possible that peoples'
viewpoints are distorted by this?

Also, the Apollo program seems more impressive and worth studying than the
atomic bomb to me. Like, in one case, they produced unprecedentedly large
explosions, and in the other, they did that _and_ balanced people on top _and_
got them to the moon and back.

------
drodio
@ianmiell awesome post. Part of the issue: The word “culture” does not fully
describe the intentional “Org OS” choices that need to be made to optimize how
people can better work in a knowledge economy. [https://drodio.com/creating-
an-open-source-culture/](https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/)

------
cslawson
There's a really great animation done on top of a talk by David Marquet which
summarizes the book, I believe.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm4mCn5x5iM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm4mCn5x5iM)

------
ajcarpy2005
I recommend The Rise of the Creative Class.

------
jksmith
people need to be told what to do loop people wait do only what they're told;
people need to be told what to do; if people don't have to be told what to do,
exit; end Deming made this observation 50 years ago.

------
gtirloni
Some good pirate ship techniques in a Navy submarine.

------
steele
leader-leader only works if the commitment and incentives are relatively
uniform.

