Experience tells us how to how to identify and prioritize actions that will move us from where we are to where we are going, through awareness of our environment, comparisons with similar situations, and careful evaluation of alternatives. When you lack experience, it's difficult to see more than one step ahead of where you are, because you do not have a good intuitive sense of possible outcomes for the future; not having relevant experience really means that you don't have relevant events or training in your past to relate the present situation to.

When you can anticipate and properly characterize what's likely to happen in the future from an accurate assessment of the current situation, and where you need to go, then you can make an effective plan to get there. If you don't have the basis for producing such a plan, then random chance will dictate what happens, or you will likely end up making things up as you go, and what happens will seem at each step to be a surprise. Experience is valued since patterns from our past can be recognized and exploited to reduce risk and exploit learning. But not all experience is equivalent. Read more »

Below is a graphical depiction of my own mental model of how people perform work. It provides a high-level overview of how people function within their assignments, and highlights many of the elements involved in determining how effective a person is in delivering value within a larger activity. The elements in this figure are each discussed in more detail throughout this article.

Note that this representation is deliberately relevant to both an employee's and manager's roles (including when a manager is preparing for and conducting evaluations, and an employee as they prepare for and participate in them). Both of these partners act in a world of imperfect information, and are trying to influence their respective worlds to maximize the outcomes for their stakeholders, through their collaborative efforts. Read more »

A guide to attracting, recruiting, interviewing, and hiring the best technical talent.

• A comprehensive system for hiring top-notch technical employees
• Packed with useful information and specific advice written in a breezy, humorous style
• Learn how to find great people--and get them to work for you--in an afternoon!

The top software developers are ten times as productive as average developers. Ten times. You can't afford not to hire them. But if you haven't been reading Joel Spolsky's books or blog, you probably don't know how to find them and make them want to work for you.

In this brief book, Joel reveals all his secrets--from his years at Microsoft, and as the co-founder of Fog Creek Software--for recruiting the best developers in the world. You'll learn: Read more »

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. You will learn: Read more »

In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel challenges traditional thinking on the practice of management. He argues that management innovation is needed since more traditional approaches - centered on control and efficiency - no longer work in a world where adaptability and creativity are increasingly crucial to business success. He argues that current management challenges most frequently are focused around how to accelerate change, get everyone involved in innovation, and engaged to give their best - and none of these goals can be achieved very effectively (or sustainably) in a command and control-oriented environment. I couldn't agree more.

Hamel offers a somewhat traditionalist job description for a manager, which is to:

• Set and program objectives
• Motivate and align effort
• Coordinate and control activities
• Develop and assign talent 
• Accumulate and apply knowledge 
• Amass and allocate resources 
• Build and nurture relationships
• Balance and meet stakeholder demands

He then explains how these goals are in fact most likely to be achieved when everyone in the organization is engaged in their pursuit; it's not just the manager's job, but everyone's job. The manager can only be the catalyst. Read more »