Customer Reviews

Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a brilliant book, capped off with an excellent interview with record producer Tony Visconti, who reveals that the principles behind great teams transcend the genre of software development. From the value of knowing his people to diligent tracking of work charts built by everyone and collaboration in general, it is no surprise that that Tony's experience with musicians sounds a lot like a great software project. He admonishes that we should all devote our downtime to learning new stuff, and this book provides plenty of insights for any of us.

The many contributors step back from advancing their usual prescriptions to celebrate their own successes (and yes, challenges) within teams. In this celebration, they provide some of the best insights that we can carry forward into our own careers.

Whether Jennifer Greene draws wondrous team memories from the ashes of a dot-com failure, Keoki Andrus' shares a healthy respect for innovation and creative play to inspire a team, or engaging stories by Karl Wiegers and many others capture great team experiences, the variety in Beautiful Teams will keep you rapt like few other technical books.

This book is great! It's a very quick read, and it was actually fun! I've been looking for insight into teamwork and software teams, and I was definitely not disappointed. To be honest, going into it I wasn't really sure what to expect. It dives straight into an interview with Tim O'Reilly about leadership, and he immediately starts talking about teams, creativity, design, open source, but in a way that all tied together and made sense. Then came an essay called "Why Ugly Teams Win," by Scott Berkun, who wrote about his experience on a team at Microsoft. I thought the combination of "higher" ideas and practical, real-world experience, right next to each other, worked extremely well.

The book is divided into sections called People, Goals, Practices, Obstacles and Music. When I first saw that, I was surprised by the last section. But it turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the book. It's got an interview with Tony Visconti, and what he says about working with musicians actually made a lot of sense, and I could see exactly why it made sense as the last chapter in the book. All of the chapters stand on their own, and they all make different points about teams. It's easy to just go right through them, from front to end. It's a unique collection, and in my opinion it's definitely worth your time.

Beautiful Teams is a wonderful collection of stories by great names in software about their experiences with teams. From Mike Cohn, Scott Ambler, Grady Booch, Steve McConnell, Scott Berkun, Johanna Rothman, James Grenning... And even a few non-software folks who make the stories that much more compelling because they transcend discipline.

The book is broken into 4 main sections - one each for the primary themes that come up when talking about beautiful teams: People, Goals, Practices, and Obstacles. One of my favorites is Scott Berkun's Why Ugly Teams Win, which proclaims "real heroes are ugly. They are misfits." Citing as examples The Ramones, The Dirty Dozen, and The Bad News Bears. "Once the members of an ugly team have earned each others' trust, they will outperform the rest of any organization."

It's a book that can't help but make you smile as you think of your own experiences with great teams and what makes them so awesome to be part of. I don't know that there's the answer to how to build a beautiful team in here, it is more a book of tales. But it is definitely a topic we will do well to be thinking more about in software development and a fun book to read.

And, again, I love Scott Berkun's advice, "Stop complaining about your coworkers. Instead, get your team and your boss to read Beautiful Teams." Indeed!

This book's a good read and a nice addition to your bookshelf, although its uneven writing style and fractured voice detract from some great tidbits.

Beautiful Teams is a collection of interviews and essays by various folks in and around the software industry. Each chapter is a great interview with folks like Steve McConnell or Scott Ambler, or an essay-like article from Mike Cohn or Corey Doctorow. Chapters are slotted into broad sections dealing with individuals, goals, practices, obstacles, and music - as in how parallels can be drawn between musicians in a band and members of software teams.

The uneven writing style and fractured voice can be somewhat expected since each author wrote their own articles, but tighter editing could have really polished up the chapters and made the book more cohesive. The tone of many of the articles made it seem they were drawn directly from the authors' blogs - another point for having had some tighter editing. I also wished that each chapter had an introduction/bio about the author. While these people are supposed industry leaders, there were quite a few authors I wasn't familiar with, so I was left wondering what their accomplishments were that made them a target to get in the book.

Complaints aside, I got very good value from reading the book. The wisdom in several articles around dealing with team dynamics was exceedingly useful, and I also found it good backup to read industry leaders pointing out it's important to move poor performers or negative influences off teams.

Several chapters really stood out for me: Grady Booch's interview on creating team cultures, James Grenning's article on implementing extreme programming (XP) in a heavily bureaucratic shop during XP's early days, and Steve McConnell's interview about improving team skills, morale, and practices.

Booch's interview really struck home due to his discussion of working on geographically distributed teams. I'm a remote worker and am far away from everyone I work with at Telligent, so this was particularly interesting to me. Booch's comments on the importance of trust between team members and dealing with cultural issues really struck home - he emphasized that technology isn't the limiting factor on poor-performing distributed teams.

Greening's experience pushing for change was a great read. The tone and style are clunky, but the content's gold. Greening was learning XP in its earliest days and worked hard to get an XP team going on a project in a very tight-laced, policy-ridden company. The number one takeaway from me from this article was something I'm already a huge believer in: culture change will utterly fail if you don't have management and leadership that actively supports the change.

I've yet to read anything from Steve McConnell that wasn't ridden with great wisdom, and his interview in this book certainly kept that tradition. His points on helping establish a team identity were highly useful. I loved his commentary on the asinine failure (my words) of companies to budget funds for team and morale building. It makes no sense that companies will spend millions on payroll, yet do nothing to build and grow team morale.

Overall I've really enjoyed reading this book. It's one of the few I'll keep around on my bookshelf.

The very first chapter I read concerned a software team which morphed into an improv comedy troupe which also wrote successful (for some definition of success) code. This narrative was so funny that I was nearly in tears by the end. I would not be surprised to see the "turducken" software model or theoretical scatology enter the geek lexicon as a result. It alone is worth the price of the book, though it is also worth noting that proceeds from about every 3000 copies sold will be used to purchase a PlayPump to provide clean drinking water to a developing area.

My impression of this book is that it is the one that Andrew Stellman wishes he had read prior to turning down that project management promotion the first time. A pithy variant on that sentence would be a more appropriate title for the book. But as it is part of O'Reilly's "Beautiful <noun>: <descriptive keywords>" brand, that was clearly not possible. Stellman and Greene both include first hand vignettes from their early careers and contribute to the interviews. But in the interviews, Greene's questions are fashioned in a more mainstream interviewer-subject style. Stellman's questions often employ a more personal style as though you were witness to selected conversations he'd had since transitioning to project management.

The interview format is less than 50% of the book, with the balance being vignettes and essays from the contributors told from a first person perspective about particularly memorable teams they worked with. Many of the authors are not "famous", some have not previously been published and at least one was not a "leader". I can't think of a single one that was not worth reading. In some cases the contributions tend toward tranche de vie, rather than an abstracted discussion of the operation of the team. Because these lack a strict "how we did/didn't do it" format, you might suspect they'd detract from a "how to build a better team" format.

You'd be wrong on two counts, however. The first is that they break up the structure of the standard business literature, making the book overall very easy to read. In fact, the first day I read one chapter at random and then skipped around and read a "few" more. The next day, when I inventoried what I had read, I found that I had actually consumed more than a third of the entire book! The second count is that taken in aggregate, these tranches de vie allow you to start picking out patterns that are not necessarily apparent in any single contribution. In this way the book successfully "creates a context in which other people can think**"


The editing is a little lax, but I did not find it too intrusive, though there are a couple of missing transition paragraphs which ought to be included in future editions.


*Quote from the interview with Tim O'Reilly.
** Tim O'Reilly quoting Edwin Schlossberg

No one is encouraged to pick up this book at all UNLESS:
1. You don't mind drawing your own conclusions from stories.
2. You like to see how others think, rather than have them think on your behalf.
3. You want to learn from the mistakes of others.

If anything, this book is excellent in its execution - the editors do not herd their writers towards any sort of communal agreement. There is no one-two-three step formula to follow to create a good team. In that, the book helps you to recognise that even building or managing a good team depends very much on the people that you are dealing with, and the situation. There is no one way to fix up a perfect team!

I love the way writers are willing to share from their experiences without dictating the way forward. No self-pompous, self-righteous, do-it-my-way-or-the-highway approaches. They explain their rationale, and you get a clear idea of how best to think, rather than how best to do, and then you can run with that.

Excellent. A must read for anyone who's probably not stuck in an MBA mindset. (Nothing against MBAs, everything against wholly structured thinking, such as KPIs)

Lots of really great interviews and interviewees, but for any Bowie / T Rex / Morrissey fans, I particularly recommend the Tony Visconti interview. Quite surreal to read the guy who produced Scary Monsters discussing why delivering a project using a waterfall-style process is sub-optimal:

"Halfway or maybe three-quarters of the way through the project, I bring what I have to the record company and ask them, "What do you think? Are we going in the right direction?" "

Libraries strong in software engineering guides will welcome BEAUTIFUL TEAMS: INSPIRING AND CAUTIONARY TALES FROM VETERAN TEAM LEADERS. It tells how to build and work with an effective team, showing how good software can be built even by people who don't get along, and it shows team leaders how to keep everyone on track. This key acquisition is a 'must' with contributions from a range of successful team leaders.

This book exceeded my expectations and I recommend it to "team leaders", or aspiring team leaders, of any field. As a producer and small business owner, I found the stories fun, informational and, like the title says, inspiring! I learned a few things about myself and my style of working with others. I was inspired to branch out after reading some of these interviews - and have set out new goals every day since because of this book. I found it to be a turning point... Excellent work.

I am almost 3/4 through this book and love the interviews. The great thing about the book is that I can pick it up on any chapter and not only learn something but also be entertained. Several stories are so unbelievable that I found my self mouth agape...however, I then realized I have been a few small steps from being in the same place.