Peopleware by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

• Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components.
• The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.
• The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do. [...] Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.
• The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.
• Your people are very aware of the one short life that each person is allotted. And they know too well that there has got to be something more important than the silly job they’re working on.
• Most organizations don’t even keep statistics on turnover.
• People under time pressure don’t work better--they just work faster.
• We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce--not the quantity of product, but the quality.
• Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.
• Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.
• Parkinson’s Law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people.
• In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals.
• Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.
• The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
• There are a million ways to lose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.
• As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it’s not worth improving anything but the workplace.
• Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals:
• Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.
• Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer.
• Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1.
• While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.
• Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.
• During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement. In this state, there is a gentle sense of euphoria, and one is largely unaware of the passage of time.
• A disruptive environment can make it difficult or impossible to attain flow.
• Your people bring their brains with them every morning. They could put them to work for you at no additional cost if only there were a small measure of peace and quiet in the workplace.
• People who are charged with getting work done must have some peace and quiet to do it in. That means periods of total freedom from interruptions.
• When you’re doing think-intensive work like design, interruptions are productivity killers.
• Groups of people who have been assigned or have elected to work together need to have a meaningful role in the design of their own space.
• The problem of windowless space is a direct result of a square aspect ratio. If buildings are constructed in a fairly narrow shape, there need to be no shortage of windows.
• The final outcome of any effort is more a function of who does the work than of how the work is done. Yet modern management science pays almost no attention to hiring and keeping the right people.
• Court success with this formula:
• Get the right people.
• Make them happy so they don’t want to leave.
• Turn them loose.
• For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment the team is formed and the initial directions set out. With talented people, the manager can almost coast from that point on.
• The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management. Strong managers don’t care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff’s accomplishments.
• The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional.
• Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like everyone else, a perfect drone.
• Entropy is levelness or sameness. The more it increases, the less potential there is to generate energy or do work. In the corporation or other organization, entropy can be thought of as uniformity of attitude, appearance, and thought process. Just as thermodynamic entropy is always increasing in the universe, so, too, corporate entropy is on the rise.
• Second Thermodynamic Law of Management
• Entropy is always increasing in the organization.
• The most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though they may deviate from the corporate norm.
• Leadership on the job is rare, but talk about it is ubiquitous. Companies talk about it all the time.
• In order to lead without positional authority--without anyone ever appointing you leader--you have to:
• Step up to the task.
• Be evidently fit for the task.
• Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time.
• Maximize value to everyone.
• Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill.
• It also helps to have charisma.
• Innovation is all about leadership, and leadership is all about innovation. The rarity of the one is a direct result of the rarity of the other.
• If companies were more inclined to let leadership arise naturally, they wouldn’t need to produce so much hot air talking about it.
• What could be more sensible than asking each candidate to bring along some samples of work to the interview?
• One generation’s technology is the next generation’s environment.
• In the most-simplistic terms, the new generational divide in your organization is about attention: Young people divide theirs while their older colleagues tend to focus on one or possibly two tasks at a time.
• Articulating the contract to young workers is going to be essential to give them a chance to fit in. If work needs to be done in flow, then your people need to be ready to focus. Continuous-partial-attention periods have to be defined as personal time off, acceptable within limits during the workday. The rest of the workday is for, well, work.
• We avoid measuring turnover for the same reason that heavy smokers avoid having long serious talks with their doctors about longevity: It’s a lot of bother that can only result in bad news.
• The average person leaves after a little more than two years. It costs one-and-a-half to two months’ salary to hire a new employee, either as a fee to an agency, or as the cost of an in-house personal service that does the same function.
• In companies with high turnover, people tend toward a destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just aren’t going to be there very long.
• The best organizations are not of a kind; they are more notable for their dissimilarity than for their likenesses. But one thing that they all share is a preoccupation with being the best.
• The best organizations are consciously striving to be best. This is a common goal that provides common direction, joint satisfaction, and a strong binding effect.
• A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining.
• An expense is money that gets used up. At the end of the month, the money's gone and so is the heat (or whatever the expense was for). An investment, on the other hand, is use of an asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used up, but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an expenditure as an investment instead of as an expense, you are capitalizing the expenditure.
• People work better and have more fun when the team comes together. 
• Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. The team can become almost unstoppable, a juggernaut for success. Managing these juggernaut teams is a real pleasure.
• Teams by their very nature are formed around goals.
• Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naive managerial optimism.
• The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
• Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity.
• The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions are easy and confident and warm.
• It makes good sense for you, the manager, to take a defensive posture in most areas of risk.
• There’s one area, though, where defensiveness will always backfire: You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. If your staff isn’t up to the job at hand, you will fail.
• Mindless paper pushing is a waste. It ought to be attacked because it keeps people from working.
• Paper pushers just can’t get themselves into SWAT Team mode.
• Most organizations don’t set out consciously to kill teams. They just act that way.
• Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by the negative side effects.
• Good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together.
• The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers.
• If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally. Any easily separable taks is a perfect opportunity.
• People require a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with themselves, and they need to be at peace with themselves to let the jelling process begin. When management acts to stifle uniqueness, uniqueness happens anyway. People simply express their uniqueness in uncontrolled dimensions.
• The essence of successful management is to get everyone pulling in the same direction and then somehow get them fired up to the point that nothing, not even their manager, could stop their progress.
• When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic. The new system is capable of making only those responses planned explicitly by its builders. So the self-healer quality is lost. Any response that will be required must be put there in the first place. If ever the system needs to be healed, that can only be done outside the context of its operation.
• The organization that you work in or manage is in some sense a system. It is an amalgam of interacting people and processes that exist to achieve some end.
• The maddening thing about most of our organizations is that they are only as good as the people who staff them.
• Like any other system, a team of human workers will lose its self-healing properties to the extent it becomes deterministic.
• Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
• Projects that have real value but little or no risk were all done ages ago. The ones that matter today are laden with risk.
• It’s perfectly reasonable not to manage a risk for which the probability of occurrence is extremely low. It’s not reasonable to leave unmanaged the risk for which the consequences are “just too awful to think about”.
• As organizations age, meeting time increases until--in the final stages--there is time for nothing else.
• The technology that is so evident at meetings today does not facilitate the meeting at all; it merely provides an escape for people from the pointlessness of what’s happening around them. What the technology enhances is the dreadfulness of meetings.
• The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time. It sounds like this should be an easy sin to avoid, but it isn’t. You have some needs of your own as a manager, and these needs may run squarely against your intention to preserve and use wisely the time of the people working under you.
• Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you’re not going to get much done.
• One of the reasons that organizations are bogged down with everybody plowing through endless numbers of endless emails is that there is an unwritten rule at work. The rule is: silence gives consent.
• Every time we deliver a new system, we are obliging people to change the way they do their work; we might be redefining their jobs entirely.
• When we start out to change, it is never certain that we will succeed. And the uncertainty is more compelling than the potential for gain.
• The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.
• Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure--at least a little bit of failure--is also okay.
• Experience gets turned into learning when an organization alters itself to take account of what experience has shown.
• Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.
• A pilot project is one in which you set the fat book of standards aside and try some new and improved technique. The new technique will be unfamiliar initially, and so you can expect to be inefficient at the start in applying it. This is the cost of change. On the other side of the ledger is the improvement in productivity gained from using the new technique.
• Don’t experiment with more than one aspect of development technology on any given project.
• War games help you to evaluate your relative strengths and weaknesses and help the organization to observe its global strengths and weaknesses.
• The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose.
• A single person acting alone is not likely to affect any meaningful change. But there’s no need to act alone.
• Sociology matters more than technology or even money.