“Management Time: Who’s got the Monkey” is probably one of the most popular management article published by the Harvard Business Review (PDF can be found here). It’s been written by William Oncken and Donald Wass in 1974. It’s been reprinted several time since then and the message is still very true. This is a must read for everyone who has trouble delegating and ends up doing their subordinates or peers work.
If you can relate to the following situation, you should definitely read the article:
Let us imagine that a manager is …

On May 14th, Google has experienced one of its largest public outage. Not only Google homepage was down but it also affected most of Google’s services including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Apps and AdSense. Google has taken responsibility for the problem. Urs Hoelzle, SVP of Operation at Google, released the following statement:
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight …

According to this article, it looks like testing is overrated !! Code review might be the way to go !
Most studies have found that inspections are cheaper than testing. A Study at the Software Engineering Laboratory found that code reading detected about 80 percent more faults per hour than testing (Basili and Selby 1987). Another organization found that it cost six times as much to detect design defects by using testing as by using inspections (Ackerman, Buchwald, and Lweski 1989). A later study at IBM found that only 3.5 staff …

Software quality metrics must be part of the top 5 discussed subjects if you’ve been working in a Software engineering team. Discussion are usually endless as there is no silver bullet. I was reading this article today which summarizes the typical issues when deciding which metrics to track.
Should we track:

Number of tests?
Pass rate?
Plan versus actual?
Run to plan?
Pass to plan?
Number of defects?
Code coverage?
Functional coverage?
Performance figures?

I’ve always picked up quite a bit of management and business knowledge by observing and talking to leaders around me. I’ve been fairly lucky so far and have been regularly surrounded by people who impressed and inspired me. They all helped me in one way or another to get better at what I’m doing.
Another way to get some inspiration and motivation is to read biographies about very successful people in whatever industry they are working in. Jack Welch, is one of these people and his biography Straight from the Gut …