Quality Software ManagementVol 3. Congruent Action

is the title of an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-28-5). This is the second snippet review for this book (here's the first). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Management is the number one random process element.

If you cannot manage yourself you have no business managing others.

Congruent behaviours are not stereotyped behaviours - quite the contrary. Congruent behaviours are original, specific behaviours that fit the context, other, and self, as required by the Law of Requisite Variety.

Congruence is contagious.

It takes a long time and a lot of hard practice to raise your congruence batting average.

A basic law of perception is that we tend to minimise small differences (tendency toward assimilation) and to exaggerate appreciable differences (tendency toward contrast). Thus, our perceptions make the world more sharply differentiated than it is, and we're a lot more alike than we are different.

The simplest idea about curing addiction is to stop the use of X, under the belief that X causes addiction. X does not cause the addiction, the addiction dynamic causes the addiction.

To change the addiction you'll have to use something more powerful than logic.

One of the manager's primary jobs is to set the context in which interactions takes place and work is accomplished.

Management sets the context almost exclusively through the use of language.

Culture makes language, then language makes culture.

In all Steering (Pattern 3) organisations, the team is the fundamental unit of production.

I've learned that there's simply no sense trying to solve software engineering problems, or create software engineering organisations, when I'm not able to be congruent. So I work on that first, and that's what I hope you do, too.