November 2026
Beginner to intermediate
242 pages
5h 1m
English
Content preview from A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Foreword
I became a team lead for the first time in 2011—officially, at least. I had led teams and projects before, but these things are a little more loosey-goosey at startups (and a lot more loosey-goosey in 2011). Now I had an actual role and a title. Impressed with myself, I asked my manager if there were any new skills I should learn, and if so, which books should I read?
He handed me two: High Output Management, by Andy Grove, and Managing Humans, by Michael Lopp.1
I read Lopp’s book diligently, a little baffled. There was a clear cultural divide between the world he described and the one I inhabited. His: layers of bureaucracy, meetings upon meetings, strategy documents, offices with doors; mine, ten engineers in a room with a whiteboard. It took me a while to figure out what, or how, or if any of this even applied to me.
It wasn’t love at first sight. It was love at “Bored People Quit.”2
That piece got me. It so perfectly described the job I had just left, and it described why I had left the job before that. It described several coworkers I had seen grow increasingly bored and detached from their jobs, then leave.
I subscribed to the Rands in Repose RSS feed in my Google Reader (RIP), and for years I read every post.
Then I decided I’d outgrown him.
Managing Humans Was a Strange, Radical Object in 2011
When I finished reading Managing Humans, I was hooked, so I went looking for more books like it.
There weren’t any.
Sure, there were management books (Mythical Man-Month ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.