This book is NOT about project management, it is about 1st line supervision. Of course, 1st line supervisors interface with management and this book addresses that some, but that doesn't address project management from a manager's view, just a supervisor's. You need to know who this book is for. It is for an experienced supervisor, someone who can spot the occasional errors. In this case the errors are strongly held but misplaced opinions. One error the author made was to call programmers lazy who read source code as part of a job (p. 50). That's a foolish statement. If you've ever debugged someone else's undocumented code, you have to read the source to even figure out what the code is supposed to do. He praises people who make snap decisions (p. 20). That's silly. It's better than no decision, but certainly not praiseworthy. And on pp. 113-115 he says to "Give Experts the Boot." Here he's parroting the "we need generalists" mantra that became popular about 5 or 6 or 7 years ago. I've seen a very noticible drop in quality all over the industry. One example, when one company I worked at got rid of their Ph.D. from MIT who did thermal analysis and replaced him with a non-degreed mechanical designer who was trying to run thermal analysis software, not even having a clue on the intricacies of thermal analysis and design. At this point the thermal design of their computers became a joke. Maybe it would work and maybe it wouldn't. Don't get me wrong. The author has a number of good points. E.g., fix bugs ASAP (p. 128), don't let them pile up for later. Set your coding priorities (pp. 17-19), and do proper postmortems (pp. 78-80). Very good book, but you must beware of his errors. If you are young, read this again after 10 to 15 years.
