Managing Humans

Managing Humans is a selection of the best essays from Michael Lopp's web site, Rands in Repose. Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account.

Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you.

• What to do when people start yelling at each other
• How to perform a diving save when the best engineer insists on resigning
• How to say "no" to the person who signs your paycheck

This book is designed for managers and would-be managers staring at the role of a manager wondering why they would ever leave the safe world of bits and bites for the messy world of managing humans. The book covers handling conflict, managing wildly differing personality types, infusing innovation into insane product schedules, and figuring out how to build a lasting and useful engineering culture.

1. Don't Be a Prick
2. Managers are Not Evil
3. The Monday Freakout
4. Agenda Detection
5. Mandate Dissection
6. Information Starvation
7. Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence
8. Managementese
9. Technicality
10. Avoiding the Fez
11. Your Resignation Checklist
12. Saying No
13. 1.0
14. Taking Time to Think
15. The Soak
16. Malcolm Events
17. Capturing Context
18. Status Reports 2.0
19. Trickle Theory
20. A Glimpse and a Hook
21. Nailing the Phone Screen
22. Ninety Days
23. Bellwethers
24. NADD
25. A Nerd in a Cave
26. Meeting Creatures
27. Incrementalists and Completionists
28. Organics and Mechanics
29. Inwards, Outwards, and Holistics
30. Free Electrons
31. Rules for the Reorg
32. Offshore Risk Factor
33. Joe
34. Secret Titles