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From: john@nmt.edu (John Shipman)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Me, a manager??
Summary: Two books for managers
Message-ID: <1990Jun7.215912.17701@nmt.edu>
Date: 7 Jun 90 21:59:12 GMT
References: <_'`$'1+@masalla.fulcrum.bt.co.uk> <7459@fy.sei.cmu.edu> <59826@coherent.coherent.com>
Organization: Zoological Data Processing
Lines: 71

I'd like to recommend a couple of good books for software
managers.

1.  ``Peopleware---Productive Projects and Teams,'' Tom de
    Marco and Timothy Lister (Dorset House, 1987).

    Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naive
    manager's imagination.  Oh, there might be some benefit
    in a few extra hours worked on Saturday to meet a Monday
    deadline, but that's almost always followed by an equal
    period of compensatory ``undertime'' while the workers
    catch up with their lives. (p. 15)

    American office workers have barely looked up while their
    work quarters have been degraded from sensible to silly.
    Not so long ago, they worked in two- and three-person
    offices with walls, doors, and windows....  In such space,
    one could work in quiet or conduct meetings with colleagues
    without disrupting neigbors.  Then, without warning,
    open-plan seating was upon us like a plague upon the
    land.... (p. 52)

    During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a
    state that psychologists call FLOW.... Unfortunately,
    you can't turn on flow like a switch.  It takes a slow
    descent into the subject, requiring fifteen minutes or
    more of concentration before the state is locked in.
    During this immersion period, you are particularly
    sensitive to noise and interruption.... Once locked in,
    the state can be broken by an interruption that is
    focused on you (your phone, for instance) or by insistent
    noise (``Attention!  Paging Paul Portulaca.'')....  If
    the average incoming phone call takes five minutes and
    your reimmersion period is 15 minutes, the total cost
    of that call in flow time (work time) lost is 20 minutes.
    A dozen phone calls use up half a day.  A dozen other
    interruptions and the rest of the work day is gone.  This
    is what guarantees, ``You never get anything done around
    here between 9 and 5.'' (p. 63)

2. ``Up the organization'' by Robert Townsend (Fawcett, 1970).

    There's nothing fundamentally wrong with our country except
    that the leaders of all our major organizations are
    operating on the wrong assumptions.  We're in this mess
    because for the last 200 years we've been using the Catholic
    Church and Caesar's legions as our pattern for creating
    organizations.  And until the last forty or fifty years it
    made sense.  The average churchgoer, soldier, and factory
    worker was uneducated and dependent on orders from above...
    (``People,'' p. 119)

    A manager cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in
    business an order given by his boss or his boss's boss,
    when the person giving the order is absent from the field
    of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware
    of the latest state of affairs.  It follows that any
    manager who undertakes to carry out a plan which he
    considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his
    reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally
    tender his resignation rather than be the the instrument
    of his organization's downfall. (``Disobedience and its
    necessity,'' p. 35, paraphrasing Napoleon)

    People have different metabolisms.  If you work better
    from noon to midnight and your job makes those hours
    appropriate, you should be able to do it. (``Office
    hours,'' p. 113)
-- 
John Shipman/Zoological Data Processing/Socorro, NM/john@jupiter.nmt.edu
``Let's go outside and commiserate with nature.''  --Dave Farber