The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

The measure of the executive, Peter Drucker reminds us, is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.

Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned:

Management of time
Choosing what to contribute to the practical organization
Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect
Setting up the right priorities
And Knitting all of them together with effective decision making

Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.

The Power of Building the Best Product in Your Market with SiteGround’s Tenko Nikolov

Foundr Magazine Podcast EP136: The Power of Building the Best Product in Your Market with SiteGround’s Tenko Nikolov

For as long as he can remember, Tenko Nikolov has been obsessed with computers. From his very first computer at the age of 7, he fell in love with the simple green and black screen and was fascinated with all that this technology could offer.

Of course, he also got into some trouble, even accidentally hacking into a large US corporation’s network with a friend at the age of 13. After a few days of fun messing with their systems and bragging to their friends, the duo eventually sent an email to the company letting them know what they did and how they did it.

The next few days were agonizing as they waited for a response, petrified that an FBI agent would be showing up to his doorstep in Bulgaria. To his surprise, however, the company reached out, thanked them for finding a security loophole and even asked them how much they’d like to be paid for finding it in the first place.

“I realized that I can actually be paid for the thing that I love to do most,” Nikolov says.

Instead of asking for payment, Nikolov asked for his own server that he could play around with. After getting his first taste of entrepreneurship, he began seeing how far he could push the limits of computer technology. Looking back at it now, Nikolov pinpoints this as the exact moment that led him to develop SiteGround, a web-hosting server and provider.

But what makes SiteGround stand out from the thousands of competitors out there, is Nikolov’s dedication to innovating.

Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World

Holacracy is a revolutionary management system that redefines management and turns everyone into a leader.

Holacracy distributes authority and decision-making throughout an organization, and defines people not by hierarchy and titles, but by roles. Holacracy creates organizations that are fast, agile, and that succeed by pursuing their purpose, not following a dated and artificial plan.

This isn’t anarchy it’s quite the opposite. When you start to follow Holacracy, you learn to create new structures and ways of making decisions that empower the people who know the most about the work you do: your frontline colleagues.

Some of the many champions of Holacracy include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (author of the #1 “New York Times” bestseller “Delivering Happiness”), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium), and David Allen.

Scrum and XP from the Trenches – 2nd Edition

This second edition is an annotated version, a “director’s cut” where Henrik reflects upon the content and shares new insights gained since the first version of the book.

The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. You have to experiment and continuously adapt the process until it suits your specific situation.

This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.

Under the leadership of Henrik Kniberg they experimented with different team sizes, different sprint lengths, different ways of defining “done”, different formats for product backlogs and sprint backlogs, different testing strategies, different ways of doing demos, different ways of synchronizing multiple Scrum teams, etc. They also experimented with XP practices – different ways of doing continuous build, pair programming, test driven development, etc, and how to combine this with Scrum.

This book includes:

Practical tips and tricks for most Scrum and XP practices
Typical pitfalls and how they were addressed
Diagrams and photos illustrating day-to-day work
Testing and test-driven development
Scaling and coordinating multiple teams
Dealing with resistance from inside and outside the team
Planning and time estimation techniques