The Art of Leadership

The Art of Leadership

by Michael Lopp
Released May 2020
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781492045694

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Book description

Many people think leadership is a higher calling that resides exclusively with a select few who practice and preach big, complex leadership philosophies. But as this practical book reveals, what’s most important for leadership is principled consistency. Time and again, small things done well build trust and respect within a team.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. Lopp has been speaking and writing about this topic for over a decade and now maintains a Slack leadership channel with over 13,000 members.

The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders—as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

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Table of contents

  1. Foreword
  2. Introduction
    1. How to Use This Book
    2. O’Reilly Online Learning
    3. How to Contact Us
    4. Acknowledgments
  3. Small Things
  4. I. Netscape: Manager
  5. 1. Assume They Have Something to Teach You
  6. 2. Meeting Blur
    1. Too Much
    2. On the Topic of Operational Excellence
  7. 3. The Situation
    1. Capital-S Situations
    2. Capital-D Decisions
  8. 4. Act Last, Read the Room, and Taste the Soup
    1. Act Last
    2. Read the Room
    3. Taste the Soup
  9. 5. Spidey-Sense
    1. Understanding Spidey-Sense
    2. Wait, What? That’s the Small Thing? Live Life? Thanks, Lopp.
    3. Trusting Spidey-Sense
    4. Something Is Up, and I Don’t Know What
  10. 6. Your Professional Growth Questionnaire
    1. The Professional Growth Questionnaire
      1. The Questions
    2. Always Forward
    3. A Tangible Follow-Up
  11. 7. A Performance Question
    1. The Checklist Sentence
    2. Reality Changes
  12. 8. Rands Information Practices
    1. Browser
    2. Phone
    3. Email
    4. Life
  13. 9. The New Manager Death Spiral
    1. BANG
    2. First, They Tell You
    3. Then, They Tell Each Other
    4. Management Is Not a Promotion
  14. II. Apple: Director
  15. 10. The Blue Tape List
    1. Everything Is Broken
    2. A Spectrum to the Broken
  16. 11. Delegate Until It Hurts
    1. Entrust
    2. Shush, Little Voice
    3. An Essential Leadership-Scaling Function
  17. 12. How to Recruit
    1. First Rule of Recruiting: Give It 50%
    2. A Recruiting Primer
    3. Discover, Understand, and Delight
      1. Discover
      2. Understand
      3. Delight
    4. Circling Back to 50% of Your Time
  18. 13. Gossip, Rumors, and Lies
    1. An Unacceptable Amount of Crap
    2. A Well-Intentioned Hatred of Meetings
    3. A Three-Point Agenda
    4. Meetings Are a Symptom, Not the Cure
  19. 14. Rainbows and Unicorns
    1. Moments of Disproportionate Satisfaction
    2. Duh
    3. The Compliment Breakdown
    4. A Compliment Career Shift
  20. 15. Say the Hard Thing
    1. The Voice in Your Head
    2. Saying the Hard Thing
    3. Hearing the Hard Thing
    4. Your Goal in Life
  21. 16. Everything Breaks
    1. Third Time’s a Charm
    2. Game On
    3. With Alarming Predictability
      1. Provide A Clear Explanation of the Rules
      2. Allow the Rules to Evolve in Unexpected Ways
      3. Play, Learn, and Repeat
    4. Failure as a Competitive Differentiator (Or, Don’t Play Dumb Games Twice)
  22. 17. The Org Chart Test
    1. The Legibility Test
    2. The Basics at Scale
  23. 18. A Distributed Meeting Primer
    1. Remote
    2. The “Many People” Meeting
      1. Pre-Meeting
      2. During
      3. Post-Meeting
    3. No Measurable Difference
  24. III. Slack: Executive
  25. 19. Allergic to Wisdom
    1. A Circus of Failure
    2. When to Innovate and When to Iterate
    3. Act Without Asking
  26. 20. The Guard
    1. The Disaster Meeting
    2. The Productive Team Teams
    3. Learned Helplessness
    4. Trust Falls for Everyone!
    5. Never Waste a Disaster
  27. 21. The Culture Creek
    1. An Unchangeable Culture
    2. Listen for the Stories
    3. The Culture Creek
  28. 22. Anti-Flow
    1. Applied Anti-Flow
    2. Weaponized Inspiration Generation
  29. 23. A Meritocracy Is a Trailing Indicator
    1. Two Paths
    2. Two Equal Paths
    3. The Growth Tax
    4. Leadership Comes from Everywhere
    5. A Trailing Indicator
  30. 24. How to Build a Rumor
    1. Gray Space
    2. Conformity
    3. The Severity of Nonsense
    4. Rumors Are a Function of Culture
  31. 25. Kobayashi Maru Management
    1. A Test of Character
    2. A System Failure
    3. A Perfect Kobayashi
    4. A Proper Preparation
    5. A Prediction of the Unpredictable
  32. 26. The Signal Network
    1. Critical Freshness
    2. Your Signal Network
    3. No Surprises
    4. High-Signal Humans
  33. 27. A Precious Hour
    1. The State of Busy Is Seductive
    2. The Faux-Zone
    3. A Precious Hour
    4. An Insidious Situation
  34. 28. Find a Mentor
    1. What Could Go Wrong?
    2. Sucker Punch
    3. My Mentor Requirements
    4. “Get the F—k Out of There”
  35. 29. How to Rands
    1. Our Average Week
    2. North Star Principles
    3. Feedback Protocol
    4. Meeting Protocol
    5. Nuance and Errata
  36. 30. Be Unfailingly Kind
    1. Regarding Colorful Personalities and Opinions
    2. Raid Mechanics
    3. No Worries…
    4. Regarding Jerks
    5. One for Your Pocket
  37. Epilogue: The Way I Heard It Was...
    1. Interlude: The Test
    2. Small Steps
  38. Index

Product information

  • Title: The Art of Leadership
  • Author(s): Michael Lopp
  • Release date: May 2020
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781492045694