Professional Challenge: Book Review of Managing Humans

Managing Humans by Michael Lopp

This is more a collection of Michael Lopp’s blogs than it is a book. It is not sequentially or systematically in order, which kept it interesting for me. In the first few introductory chapters, Michael describes the relationship between a person and his or her manager. It also provides a framework to identify who wants what from a meeting. It involves knowing you agenda before going to the meeting and facilitate the issue to move in the correct direction, and then leave the meeting. According to Lopp, our job as a manager is to give relevant information and constructive feedback to the employees. If we don’t, then they might start engaging in gossiping and other unproductive activities.  Although the impression is that managers typically lead by “talking”, the author concludes that managers should start listening to their workers more. Guiding through filling the air with words is ineffective and irrelevant if managers have not gathered and/or processed data.

The author introduces the management lingo, “managementese”, which is managerial slang that helps people from different parts of the organization to understand each other. However, Lopp warns us to not use managementese not because they might not understand what is being said, but because they might not trust the informality.

When discussing the question of whether the manager should code or not, Lopp very aptly advices to “Stop coding, and start programming.” This is because managers should be skilled in drawing extensive architectural plans that adequately describes the product. Another chapter uses the story of a problematic programmer named Fez as an example to show how to prepare for an annual review. It also exemplifies the ways of evaluating your employees.

I enjoyed reading the chapter on the do’s and don’ts of leaving a company. Although some of them were relatively obvious, I found other surprising. For example – “Don’t volunteer to do work after you leave” is interesting because I tend to be the kind of person who would like to help out if requested. Lopp also gives some very specific ideas on how to work for launching a new product. “Two meetings a week: one for brainstorming and another for prototype review.” 

The book also describes a psychological phenomenon of background processing and decision making that I found very intriguing. He also defined Malcolm Events as “Seemingly insignificant events that are intent on screwing you in an unlikely way.” According to the author, it is hard to recognize the effects of these events because of their insignificance.

Interestingly, the author explains that managers have 90 days to complete an interview of the person on a new job. The author suggests to involve a “technical bully”, “culture compatibility detector” and “vision detector” while having the interview. Each person should talk to the candidate individually. Afterwards, the manager should ask for feedback from all three.

Using the author’s descriptions of the three different types of managers according to the direction of their attention, I deduced that I am an inward and holistic manager. Inwards look towards their team, holistic look across the organization, and outwards look outside of the organization.

Despite being an interesting read, I have a complaint from Managing Humans. There were several grammatical mistakes and typos in the first few chapters of the book. Other than that, the book was definitely worthwhile reading and gave me some inspirational insight to management processes.