HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Better to be a dispensable programmer. Teach others and share knowledge and understanding and make the team as a whole "Built To Last" (http://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Compan...).

Read Jim Collins' Built to Last. His thesis is that visionary corporations don't result from markets or products or ideas, but from cultures. Entrepreneurs whose companies survive for centuries work very hard to create a whole system of values and beliefs and purpose and then institutionalize them into every aspect of the organization. Clock-builders, not time-tellers.

http://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Compan...

⬐ sgoraya

Fantastic recommendation - I find Jim Collins' books very informative and practical; tons of great useful nuggets

⬐ davidw

I read 'Good to Great' and wasn't impressed. It's not bad... but I wouldn't call it "great", either. He strikes me as some sort of "management guru", who is very unhackerish compared to other business books that actually introduce clever ideas.

⬐ steveplace

I know we're diverging from the original topic a bit, but I'd like to make a couple of comments about 'Good to Great.' I enjoyed it solely on the fact that there was a tremendous amount of research and data mining involved. He set it up as close to experimental standards as you could get in that area and pulled out the threads with the highest correlation. Adding buzzwords like hedgehog to it, however, is another story.

Since I have a mild fetish for management books, I've drawn a couple conclusions on the whole genre itself. 'Clever ideas' are subjective. I feel that if a book gives you a straight-line recipe to success, then the message has failed because it has overlooked the nuance and gray(grey?) areas that is associated with running organizations and working with people.

Enough of this; back to the topic at hand.

⬐ davidw

Interesting - I'd actually like to discuss further, but your profile has no contact information. Email me at davidw atttttt dedasys.com

⬐ Alex3917

I'll check it out. To use organization behavior speak, I'd bet that culture is to knowledge workers what systemic design is to routinized labor. That being said, I think there is a lot more money to be made from designing systems than from designing culture for three reasons:

A) Everyone knows about the importance of corporate culture for knowledge workers. While different businesses might require different best practices, there is still going to be a lot of overlap between different companies with "good" cultures. WHEREAS few people know how to design efficient systems for routinized labor, and the systems will be very specific to the company.

B) Routinized labor scales much more, so creating good systems gives you a lot more leverage than creating good cultures.

C) Knowledge workers don't create wealth in predictable patterns. With the best culture all you can do is make it more likely that someone will create something of value. But with a good system you are actually increasing measurably increasing your yield, just like finding a better catalyst for a chemical equation.

edit: Of course this isn't to say that it isn't possible to design systems for knowledge work also. Public schools are an excellent example of this. (Although, strictly speaking, schools are designed to be like factories so maybe not.)