“Scaling People” is a textbook piece of management writing
Too many management books rest on a vague idea that has been stretched to breaking point. You can tell from the depth of the margins just how hard an author has had to work to draw the thesis out. Their covers are bright and zingy. Their titles either contain action-packed words like “strive” and “ignite” or give birth to some ghastly new portmanteau like “stressilience” or “charismility”. They are determined to take lessons for bosses from anywhere but an actual business: termites, hunter-gatherers, Novak Djokovic, salad dressing. The unspoken rule of most management titles, it seems, is to avoid the actual practice of management.
What a relief, then, to read a book that breaks the mould. It lands with an intimidating thud. It looks and feels like a textbook. It is full of exercises and templates. And it is unapologetically practical in its focus. “Scaling People” is written by Claire Hughes Johnson, a tech-industry veteran who spent more than a decade at Google before joining Stripe, a digital-payments unicorn, as its chief operating officer in 2014. By the time she left that role in 2021, the firm had gone from 160 employees to over 7,000. In a world of coders, creators and visionaries, her work was to make things work.
Much of the book is a manual for creating what Ms Hughes Johnson calls an operating system—the set of documents, metrics and processes that produces a consistent framework for making decisions and improving performance. There is a section on planning, with advice on setting good goals and deciding on the cadence of meetings and reviews that sets the right drumbeat for a company. There is another on hiring people, from building a recruitment pipeline to the interview process and the task of bringing new employees on board. There are chapters on improving team performance and on giving feedback.
2023-06-22 04:25:57
Original from www.economist.com