Scott Lilly – Agile .Net Developer

If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, then you’ll want to get a copy of this book. For those of you worried about trying to save up those million dollars so that you can retire at 65 (and hopefully not have a heart attack the week after you retire), this book will show you how to think differently about work, income, and retirement.

The basic idea is for you to figure out what you enjoy in life, what it will take for you to get that now, and how you can get the largest return on your labor investment.

Once you’ve defined your goals, and figured out what you will do to achieve them, the book shows you how to focus on the small percentage of work that gives you the greatest yield. It’s the old Pareto Principle, where 20% of your efforts give you 80% of your benefits. In one of his examples, the author talks about a company of his. Out of 120 customers, the top 5 were bringing in 95% of his revenue. By concentrating on those five, he was able to reduce the amount of time he spent managing his company without losing money (he actually started making more money, by focusing on his biggest customers). I really like the idea of outsourcing and off-shoring your personal tasks.

This flies in the face of the common attitudes of growing a business, but not every business needs to be in the Fortune 500 to be successful. Success is defined as getting closer to your goals, and this book makes you apply Socratic methods and keep asking yourself, “Why am I doing this activity?” Is what you’re doing getting you closer to your goals, or is it just what you think you should be doing because that’s what businesses do?

Look at what you really want in life. Is working 40-50 hours a week for the next 30-40 years going to leave you in any shape to enjoy it? Why not figure out what it will take for you to create enough income now, so that you can live the life you want now?

Even if you don’t plan on leaving your job and starting your own company, there is plenty to learn from this book. What if you became so productive at work that you accomplished a week’s worth of work in two days? What if you were doing that while working at home? Would you like that extra time to spend with your kids, or write that novel you have inside?

I highly recommend getting The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.

It may not seem like the most obvious book to review on a blog about agile software development, but “The Goal” has as much to do with become a better developer as it does with improving a factory.

The story is written as a novel, instead of a textbook. It tells the tale of a factory manager who must find a more efficient way to run his factory, or face being closed. This book presents the Theory of Constraints, which is in the same family as Lean Manufacturing, The Toyota Production System, and the works of W. Edwards Deming. Those are also the foundations of much of the Agile development methods.

When I first read this book twenty years ago, I started to think of my programs as a factory assembly line. If you think about the data (raw materials) being entered into a system, then being processed through the different methods and procedures (welded/sanded/assembled), and finally becoming output (finished products). There is a lot that a program and an assembly line have in common.

However, after being introduced to agile development, I saw that there are even more similarities between how to improve the manufacturing process and how to improve software development. The book describes using constantly updating priorities, small batches (iterations), identifying bottlenecks (reviewing the story board), and the fact that optimizing an internal part of the process does you no good if the product is not getting out to market.

It is written as a novel, and there are some parts that I would not regret seeing cut (the whole family strife part). But this is a classic in the field, and something that your MBA managers have probably read. Reading it may provide you with a common language and set of experiences to help you speak with your management and get them on board with agile/lean/scrum/etc. techniques in your development shop.

This is a book that I highly recommend to agile developers. You can get it at Amazon by clicking here (affiliate link).