Management Bits and Tips

Thick books impress people (bit). Write and publish a technical book related to your work to show the complexity and importance of what your team does and highlight the technical ability of your department (tip).

If there is a perception among other people that the job of your team is easy and tasks can be accomplished more quickly then sufficiently thick book shows the opposite and emphasizes quality vs. speed.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

When receiving lots of e-mails people pay attention first to something unusual (bit). Flag your request, inquiry or FYI e-mail as low-priority when you send it to a general distribution list (tip).

Here you have a chance to get your e-mail noticed by curious people and if you really sent something unimportant or not appropriate you won’t be accused because your e-mail was flagged as low priority.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Follow-up and Follow-through are essential skills of every manager (bit). In the absence of specialized software use your existing e-mail system to tag important e-mail messages with keywords (tip). 

For example, when I send important analysis results and I want to look at them in retrospect after a couple of months for postmortem analysis I type the following tag at the end of my e-mail message:

[dmitry vostokov: revisit later]

After some time I just do a simple search in my inboxes to get all these tagged messages.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Just created a permanent page where you can click on individual bits. Hope you find it useful

http://www.managementbits.com/management-bits-and-tips/

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

History and current affairs books are full with political case studies (bit). Read history books to get balanced view of politics and better understand corporations, internal and external forces that shape them and move people in, up, and out (tip).

I love history since childhood. I resumed reading history books after very long period of being a software engineer and in the future posts I’m going to point to some books that I recently read or plan to read. One of them is

The Naked Capitalist

Reading this book prompted me to buy another one that I’m reading now:

Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Management as a discipline has its own language (bit). Use language learning devices like dictionaries and practice, practice, practice business speaking and writing using every opportunity (tip).

What business management dictionary can I recommend for technical managers that covers most frequently used phrases and terminology with the fewest number of pages possible so you can carry it with you? This one seems very good for beginners:

The Routledge Dictionary of Business Management

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Full stomach affects clear thinking (bit). Avoid abrupt talking about work-related issues requiring thoughtful considerations and making decisions just after having a full lunch (tip).

Right after your lunch or close to its end you might loose control and start talking straight to someone and use language that sends your message to a wrong direction and you get opposite results. I personally read science fiction and history books during my lunch time and keep silence. Keeping silence probably deserves its own management bit.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Past performance, success and achievement record doesn’t mean that the same would hold in the future (bit). Look for environment and hidden factors that explain the lucky side of success and evaluate it for new environment (tip).

This bit and tip was influenced by the following book I vehemently recommend:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Although the book focuses on trading and material success the ideas can be applied to hiring decisions and team building. Especially, contrary to the popular opinion that the past poor performance stays poor in the future, I’ve seen examples when poor past performance changed to more than average if not exceptional after environmental changes. These changes doesn’t mean changing the company to work for or pursuing entrepreneurial career but could be changes inside the same company. When hiring or promoting I would also recommend to look for the number of people in the team. It is one case when there was a small team with 2 members and one star performer and a completely different case when a team had 10 members with one star (clearly Team Lead position). However, if a candidate was a star in 5 companies but teams were 2-3 people in size we clearly have the star performer against 10 - 15 people.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

As you might have noticed I have already described 4 essential management bits forming the part of a management bit vector. For example,  

0110… bit vector describes a manager who

• writes with mistakes (0×1)
• never misspells names (0×2)
• writes reports on time (0×4)
• doesn’t read management books (0×8)
• … (0×10)
• … (0×20)
• …

So you can digitize any manager using management bits as observables. This sounds like a reductionist approach to life sciences but at least it is manageable. You can also digitize any employee or job candidate to form their employee bit vector or candidate bit vector and see how their bit vectors are close to your acceptable bit mask or even your own bit vector and this can be the basis for promotional assessment or hiring decision.

Also you can see that 32 essential management bits result in 4 billion different managers. To cope with such combinatorial explosion we might need to introduce management subsets or management bit masks later on.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Day-to-day hands-on experience only is limiting (bit). Read books, articles and blogs to deepen your understanding and broaden your knowledge and then apply to your day-to-day work (tip).

Sounds obvious but so far I have seen that engineers and managers en masse don’t read or only read on per-problem or per-task basis. It is a known fact that in order to really understand our subject matter we need to read about other experiences as well, be it science, engineering or management. Even reading one book or article about a particular topic is not enough, it is better to read several of them to avoid biases and see different viewpoints. From my personal experience, I got much deeper understanding of C++ merely by reading the vast amount of books. Although I applied hands-on C++ knowledge to the variety of projects, the real life experience was very limiting even when I happened to write and maintain parts of C++ compiler. For management roles it is even more important to read because managers cannot afford to learn from day-to-day feedback only. It might be too costly. In the future I’ll put some links and reviews for management books I found worth reading.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -