Good day! Hope you are doing well. This post does not cover a technical subject. If you follow my blog, you might have noticed that about one out of five books I purchase and read are not technical. I believe that success is based on both technical expertise and proper management.
A few decades ago I developed the software methodology which I named Cyclic Development Process (CDP for short). I applied it and tweaked it in order to simplify the development of custom and product systems. It worked very well for me.
Once again, decades ago I started writing a book with illustrations. I understand the value of a picture is worth one thousand words. To give you an idea of time, I used MacWrite for the text and MacDraw for the illustrations.
Life is not simple and it does not come with a manual. At some point I decided on making a move from the Midwest to the East Coast. I put my Macintosh 512K, hard drive and floppy disks into a couple boxes, and thought I would be able to go back to finish it in a year or so.
A couple decades went by and I decided to move the data for the book to the Windows platform. The disk and most floppies were damaged. Not only that, the software packages were no longer available. Sent the media to be restored so I could at least keep the ASCII contents, but that did not work.
A couple months ago, I decided to start from scratch as far as writing the book. I believe that it has some good points. In addition, with time I have gained experience on how to improve on some aspects of CDP. This time I have multiple backups in case adversity strikes.
That was quite a long introduction which leads to the main subject of this post. This past week I ordered from Amazon the book “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr. Today it is a #1 New York Times Bestseller. So far I have read the first chapter. Looks very promising. As I mentioned earlier, success is based on technology and methodology. The book covers the second aspect.
The book starts with how Objectives and Key Results (OKR for short) was presented to the founders of Google and how they embraced it.
In a separate post I wrote some comments on the book “Software Engineering at Google Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time” in which a group of Googlers describe with a lot of pride how they work and several tools which have been developed to help them work better and faster. If it all started with OKR, I believe the book by John Doerr would be quite interesting and worth my time. Will let you know my findings after I am done reading the book.
Remember that one of the best ways to learn is to read, experiment, and repeat. You need to revisit concepts when needed and adjust them to the current conditions.
Enjoy,
John