Management 3.0

In many organizations, management is the biggest obstacle to successful Agile development. Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization.

Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo's Management 3.0 model recognizes that today's organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships.

Management 3.0 doesn't offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them.

Coverage includes

• Getting beyond "Management 1.0" control and "Management 2.0" fads
• Understanding how complexity affects your organization
• Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated
• Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own
• Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals
• Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship
• Crafting an organizational network that promotes success
• Implementing continuous improvement that actually works

Thoroughly pragmatic — and never trendy — Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

1. Why Things Are Not That Simple
• Causality
• Complexity
• Our Linear Minds
• Reductionism
• Holism
• Hierarchical Management
• Agile Management
• My Theory of Everything
• The Book and the Model
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
2. Agile Software Development
• Prelude to Agile
• The Book of Agile
• The Fundamentals of Agile
• The Competition of Agile
• The Obstacle to Agile
• Line Management versus Project Management
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
3. Complex Systems Theory
• Cross-Functional Science
• General Systems Theory
• Cybernetics
• Dynamical Systems Theory
• Game Theory
• Evolutionary Theory
• Chaos Theory
• The Body of Knowledge of Systems
• Simplicity: A New Model
• Revisiting Simplification
• Nonadaptive versus Adaptive
• Are We Abusing Science?
• A New Era: Complexity Thinking
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
4. The Information-Innovation System
• Innovation Is the Key to Survival
• Knowledge
• Creativity
• Motivation
• Diversity
• Personality
• Only People Are Qualified for Control
• From Ideas to Implementation
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
5. How to Energize People
• Creative Phases
• Manage a Creative Environment
• Creative Techniques
• Extrinsic Motivation
• Intrinsic Motivation
• Demotivation
• Ten Desires of Team Members
• What Motivates People: Find the Balance
• Make Your Rewards Intrinsic
• Diversity? You Mean Connectivity!
• Personality Assessments
• Four Steps toward Team Personality Assessment
• Do-It-Yourself Team Values
• Define Your Personal Values
• The No Door Policy
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
6. The Basics of Self-Organization
• Self-Organization within a Context
• Self-Organization toward Value
• Self-Organization versus Anarchy
• Self-Organization versus Emergence
• Emergence in Teams
• Self-Organization versus Self-Direction versus Self-Selection
• Darkness Principle
• Conant-Ashby Theorem
• Distributed Control
• Empowerment as a Concept
• Empowerment as a Necessity
• You Are (Like) a Gardener
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
7. How to Empower Teams
• Don't Create Motivational Debt
• Wear a Wizard's Hat
• Pick a Wizard, Not a Politician
• Empowerment versus Delegation
• Reduce Your Fear, Increase Your Status
• Choose the Right Maturity Level
• Pick the Right Authority Level
• Assign Teams or Individuals
• The Delegation Checklist
• If You Want Something Done, Practice Your Patience
• Resist Your Manager's Resistance
• Address People's Ten Intrinsic Desires
• Gently Massage the Environment
• Trust
• Respect
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
8. Leading and Ruling on Purpose
• Game of Life
• Universality Classes
• False Metaphor
• You're Not a Game Designer
• But… Self-Organization Is Not Enough
• Manage the System, Not the People
• Managers or Leaders?
• Right Distinction: Leadership versus Governance
• Meaning of Life
• Purpose of a Team
• Assigning an Extrinsic Purpose
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
9. How to Align Constraints
• Give People a Shared Goal
• Checklist for Agile Goals
• Communicate Your Goal
• Vision versus Mission
• Examples of Organizational Goals
• Allow Your Team an Autonomous Goal
• Compromise on Your Goal and Your Team's Goal
• Create a Boundary List of Authority
• Choose the Proper Management Angle
• Protect People
• Protect Shared Resources
• Constrain Quality
• Create a Social Contract
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
10. The Craft of Rulemaking
• Learning Systems
• Rules versus Constraints
• The Agile Blind Spot
• What's Important: Craftsmanship
• Positive Feedback Loops
• Negative Feedback Loops
• Discipline * Skill = Competence
• Diversity of Rules
• Subsidiarity Principle
• Risk Perception and False Security
• Memetics
• Broken Windows
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
11. How to Develop Competence
• Seven Approaches to Competence Development
• Optimize the Whole: Multiple Levels
• Optimize the Whole: Multiple Dimensions
• Tips for Performance Metrics
• Four Ingredients for Self-Development
• Managing versus Coaching versus Mentoring
• Consider Certification
• Harness Social Pressure
• Use Adaptable Tools
• Consider a Supervisor
• Organize One-on-Ones
• Organize 360-Degree Meetings
• Grow Standards
• Work the System, Not the Rules or the People
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
12. Communication on Structure
• Is It a Bug or a Feature?
• Communication and Feedback
• Miscommunication Is the Norm
• Capabilities of Communicators
• Network Effects
• Tuning Connectivity
• Competition and Cooperation
• Groups and Boundaries
• Hyper-Productivity or Autocatalysis
• Pattern-Formation
• Scale Symmetry: Patterns Big and Small
• How to Grow: More or Bigger?
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
13. How to Grow Structure
• About Environment, Products, Size, and People
• Consider Specialization First…
• …And Generalization Second
• Widen People's Job Titles
• Cultivate Informal Leadership
• Watch Team Boundaries
• The Optimal Team Size Is 5 (Maybe)
• Functional Teams versus Cross-Functional Teams
• Two Design Principles
• Choose Your Organizational Style
• Turn Each Team into a Little Value Unit
• Move Stuff out to Separate Teams
• Move Stuff up to Separate Layers
• How Many Managers Does It Take to Change an Organization?
• Create a Hybrid Organization
• The Anarchy Is Dead, Long Live the Panarchy
• Have No Secrets
• Make Everything Visible
• Connect People
• Aim for Adaptability
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
14. The Landscape of Change
• The Environment Is Not "Out There"
• The Fear of Uncertainty
• Laws of Change
• Every Product Is a Success… Until It Fails
• Success and Fitness: It's All Relative
• How to Embrace Change
• Adaptation, Exploration, Anticipation
• The Red Queen's Race
• Can We Measure Complexity?
• Are Products Getting More Complex?
• The Shape of Things: Phase Space
• Attractors and Convergence
• Stability and Disturbances
• Fitness Landscapes
• Shaping the Landscape
• Directed versus Undirected Adaptation
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
15. How to Improve Everything
• Linear versus Nonlinear Improvement
• Know Where You Are
• Travel Tips for Wobbly Landscapes
• Change the Environment, Summon the Mountain
• Make Change Desirable
• Make Stagnation Painful
• Honor Thy Errors
• The Strategy of Noise
• The Strategy of Sex
• The Strategy of Broadcasts
• Don't Do Copy-Paste Improvement
• Some Last Practical Tips for Continuous Change
• Keep on Rolling
• Summary
• Reflection and Action
16. All Is Wrong, but Some Is Useful
• The Six Views of Management 3.0
• Yes, My Model Is "Wrong"
• But Other Models Are "Wrong", Too
• The Fall and Decline of Agilists
• The Complexity Pamphlet
• Summary
• Reflection and Action

You get suspicious when the book starts with 3 pages of praise for the book. from people you've never heard of. Then a lot of self-grandification of the author and explaining why he is so smart and young (it will later be shown that he has very little experience). Then some bold claims why he has revolutionized the management concept (including making some dubious claims to differentiate the line and project management roles).

He then goes on about complexity theory et al, which is stuff any aspiring MBA learns about (in fact, the whole book feels like a tentative try to create a 101 book for a bachelor management course, including casting doubt on all previous approaches (with very flimsy understanding of them).

The carries on with anecdotes and references (probably to make it look "scientific") but the text are naive and the conclusions are either obvious or not supported by the underlying material. In fact, it feels more like a university X-paper that hasn't been reviewed…

You can miss this book without missing anything meaningful.