Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition

36. The Making of Community

In this chapter, we turn to what great managers do best: the making of community. A need for community is something that is built right into the human firmware:

During my school years, my family insisted on moving almost every year, and I rarely finished a school year in the same town where I had begun it. I had a complete change of friends, acquaintances, and teachers nearly every year. One of the few constants in my life was the set of basal readers that were used by the New England schools in those years; these books were used in every school that I attended. The text concerned a family that had lived in one town, a place called Winchester, since the 1770s. Each year, the class studied a subsequent generation of ...