Recommendations based on "Difficult Conversations How to Discuss What Matters Most"

The revolutionary “Red Book” that helped a generation work smarter, better, and faster—now expanded and updated with new stories, new ideas, and new methods to radically improve the way you and your company deliver resultsIf you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, the Scrum framework is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains in workflow of as much as 1,200 percent have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid—or compelling—explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland. The thorny problem that Sutherland began tackling back then boils down to this: People are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best-laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross-purposes to one another. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars.Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and Sutherland’s experience as a West Point–educated fighter pilot, a biometrics expert, a medical researcher, an early innovator of ATM technology, and a C-level executive at eleven different technology companies, this book will take you to Scrum’s front lines, where Sutherland’s system has brought the FBI into the twenty-first century, helped support John Deere’s supply chain amid a global pandemic and supply chain shortage, reduced poverty in the Third World, and even planned weddings and accomplished weekend chores.The way we work has changed dramatically since Sutherland first introduced Scrum a decade ago. This urgent update shares new insights and provides new tools to take advantage of the radical productivity that Scrum delivers. Sutherland will show you how to optimize working with artificial intelligence and share the latest cognitive science research on culture, psychological safety, diversity, and happiness, and how these factors drive performance, innovation, and overall organizational health.This new edition contains a decade of lessons learned. Whether it’s ten years ago, now, or ten years into the future, the Scrum framework is guaranteed to help you deliver results. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable.

What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar problems for decades. And the solutions they’ve found have much to teach us.In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths show how algorithms developed for computers also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one’s inbox to peering into the future, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Don't Take On A Problem If It Isn't Yours! This book, one of the most liberating in the extraordinary One Minute Manager library, teachers an unforgettable lesson; how to save time to do what you want and need to do. Step by Step, the authors show how mangers can free themselves from doing everyone else's job and ensure that every problem is handled by the proper person. By using the Four Rules of Monkey Management, Managers will learn to become effective supervisors of time, energy and talent-especially their own.

In a sweeping vision for the future of work, Neumeier shows that the massive problems of the 21st century are largely the consequence of a paradigm shift—a shuddering gear-change from the familiar Industrial Age to the unfamiliar “Robotic Age,” an era of increasing man-machine collaboration.   This change is creating the “Robot Curve,” an accelerating waterfall of obsolescence and opportunity that is currently reshuffling the fortunes of workers, companies, and national economies. It demonstrates how the cost and value of a unit of work go down as it moves from creative to skilled to rote, and, finally, to robotic. While the Robot Curve is dangerous to those with brittle or limited skills, it offers unlimited potential to those with metaskills—master skills that enable other skills.   Neumeier believes that the metaskills we need in a post-industrial economy are feeling (intuition and empathy), seeing (systems thinking), dreaming (applied imagination), making (design), and learning (autodidactics). These are not the skills we were taught in school. Yet they’re the skills we’ll need to harness the curve.   In explaining each of the metaskills, he offers encouragement and concrete advice for mastering their intricacies. At the end of the book he lays out seven changes that education can make to foster these important talents.   This is a rich, exciting book for forward-thinking educators, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, scientists, and future leaders in every field. It comes illustrated with clear diagrams and a 16-page color photo essay. Those who enjoy this book may be interested in its slimmer companion, The 46 Rules of Genius, also by Marty Neumeier.              Things you’ll learn in Metaskills:   - How to stay ahead of the “robot curve” - How to account for “latency” in your predictions - The 9 most common traps of systems behavior - How to distinguish among 4 types of originality - The 3 key steps in generating innovative solutions - 6 ways to think like Steve Jobs - How to recognize the 3 essential qualities of beauty - 24 aesthetic tools you can apply to any kind of work - 10 strategies to trigger breakthrough ideas - Why every team needs an X-shaped person - How to overcome the 5 forces arrayed against simplicity - 6 tests for measuring the freshness of a concept   - How to deploy the 5 principles of “uncluding” - The 10 tests for measuring great work - How to sell an innovative concept to an organization - 12 principles for constructing a theory of learning - How to choose a personal mission for the real world - The 4 levels of professional achievement - 7 steps for revolutionizing education From the back cover "Help! A robot ate my job!" If you haven't heard this complaint yet, you will. Today's widespread unemployment is not a jobs crisis. It's a talent crisis. Technology is taking every job that doesn't need a high degree of creativity, humanity, or leadership. The solution? Stay on top of the Robot Curve--a constant waterfall of obsolescence and opportunity fed by competition and innovation. Neumeier presents five metaskills--feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning--that will accelerate your success in the Robotic Age.

We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it you’ll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play.Learn to increase the effectiveness, conversion rates, and usability of your own design projects by finding the answers to questions such as:What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen? What makes memories stick? What is more important, peripheral or central vision? How can you predict the types of errors that people will make? What is the limit to someone’s social circle? How do you motivate people to continue on to (the next step? What line length for text is best? Are some fonts better than others? These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.

A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech's most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem"--by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of "the network effect," where a product or service's value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they're messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them--much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.

How to Reduce Code Complexity and Develop Software More Sustainably"Mark Seemann is well known for explaining complex concepts clearly and thoroughly. In this book he condenses his wide-ranging software development experience into a set of practical, pragmatic techniques for writing sustainable and human-friendly code. This book will be a must-read for every programmer."Scott Wlaschin, author of Domain Modeling Made FunctionalCode That Fits in Your Head offers indispensable, practical advice for writing code at a sustainable pace and controlling the complexity that causes projects to spin out of control. Reflecting decades of experience helping software teams succeed, Mark Seemann guides students from zero (no code) to deployed features and shows how to maintain a good cruising speed as they add functionality, address cross-cutting concerns, troubleshoot, and optimize. They'll find valuable ideas, practices, and processes for key issues ranging from checklists to teamwork, encapsulation to decomposition, API design to unit testing. Seemann illuminates his insights with code examples drawn from a complete sample project. Written in C#, they're designed to be clear and useful to anyone who uses any object-oriented language including Java , C++, and Python. To facilitate deeper exploration, all code and extensive commit messages are available for download.Choose mindsets and processes that work, and escape bad metaphors that don'tUse checklists to improve outcomes with skills already possessedGet past analysis paralysis by creating and deploying a vertical slice to an applicationCounteract forces that lead to code rot and unnecessary complexityMaster better techniques for changing code behaviorDiscover ways to solve code problems more quickly and effectivelyThink more productively about performance and securityRegister your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. In iOS and macOS™ Performance Tuning, Marcel Weiher drills down to the code level to help you systematically optimize CPU, memory, I/O, graphics, and program responsiveness in any Objective-C, Cocoa, or CocoaTouch program.   This up-to-date guide focuses entirely on performance optimization for macOS and iOS. Drawing on 25 years of experience optimizing Apple device software, Weiher identifies concrete performance problems that can be discovered empirically via measurement. Then, based on a deep understanding of fundamental principles, he presents specific techniques for solving them.   Weiher presents insights you won’t find anywhere else, most of them applying to both macOS and iOS development. Throughout, he reveals common pitfalls and misconceptions about Apple device performance, explains the realities, and helps you reflect those realities in code that performs beautifully. Understand optimization principles, measurement, tools, pitfalls, and techniques Recognize when to carefully optimize, and when it isn’t worth your time Balance performance and encapsulation to create efficient object representations, communication, data access, and computation Avoid mistakes that slow down Objective-C programs and hinder later optimization Fix leaks and other problems with memory and resource management Address I/O issues associated with drives, networking, serialization, and SQLite Code graphics and UIs that don’t overwhelm limited iOS device resources Learn what all developers need to know about Swift performance

A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile ProcessThe Single-Source, Comprehensive Guide to Scrum for All Team Members, Managers, and ExecutivesIf you want to use Scrum to develop innovative products and services that delight your customers, Essential Scrum is the complete, single-source reference you’ve been searching for. Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively.Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin’s experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum’s roles, artifacts, and activities.Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.