After two years of work, Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley has been published! We’re so excited!
I belong to a group called the VPE/CTO Community of Practice, which is an organization for Engineering VP’s/CTOs/directors whichg gathers on a monthly basis to listen to speakers, exchange ideas, and eat and drink fine wines. We decided at some point it would be fun to write a book, because the CIO organization we are modeled on also wrote a book. So we got started. As it turned out, only some of the members of the club were interested in working on the book, but we dug in and started making progress. We wrote the book purely collaboratively using a free wiki, PbWiki. One interesting effect of that is that you can’t tell who wrote what – we all worked on it all. Anyhow, we’re done now, and we think it came out nicely.
The book talks about anything a senior engineering leader might want to know, always from a management perspective. We cover a lot of the topics that are encountered everyday in a company, but are almost never written down anywhere. We particularly avoided idealizing, and only telling success stories. Many of us wind up working in companies populated with human beings who have flaws; therefore figuring out how survive and thrive in the real world, where people are imperfect and make mistakes is crucial. So our stories are realistic – warts and all, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent!
