Management Book Round Up

Reviews of Creativity, Inc., Peopleware, The Manager's Path, Making the Right Moves, and At the Helm

September 9th, 2019 by Mark

Last spring, I was fortunate enough to receive an offer to join the faculty of Dartmouth College as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I'll be starting this appointment next summer (July 2020) leaving me a year to finish my postdoc at Princeton, recruit people for SCRAP Lab (shameless plug: I'm looking for a graduate student!), and prepare for my new responsibilities as a faculty member.

One responsibility I'm particularly keen to prepare for is managing a team. Academics receive implicit management training from observing good (and bad) examples of faculty management in their own departments. Such examples can be very helpful, but implicit training is rarely complete without complementary explicit training: we don't expect teenagers to be able to drive a car without Driver's Ed simply because they've spent hundreds of hours in the backseat, nor do we expect athletes to perform their best without coaching. However, few academic programs offer explicit training in how to manage people, leading to many tales of new PIs struggling with this role. Since the success and happiness of trainees depends to a large extent on how they are managed, this is an unfortunate gap in the typical curriculum.

To become the best advisor I can be in this regard, I've been doing some reading. Specifically, over the past few months I've read five management books: Creativity, Inc., Peopleware, The Manager's Path, Making the Right Moves, and At the Helm. These books come from a number of different perspectives: some are tailored to the context of running an academic lab, but others come from allied sectors of industry, such as tech. Having read a fair number of these books, I thought it might be helpful to me and others if I summarized my thoughts on each. Below you can find detailed reviews of each of book, in the order in which I read them. You can also skip to end to get the TL;DR verdict on the whole set.

Creativity, Inc.

Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

By Amy Wallace and Ed Catmull

Published 2014. 320 pages.

Written from the perspective of Ed Catmull - founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation - this book describes Catmull's illustrious career in animation and the management challenges he faced along the way. Although a multibillion-dollar company like Pixar may seem like a far stretch from the average research lab, there are distinct areas of overlap between managing scientists and managing a creative and highly technical workforce like that of Pixar. Moreover, Catmull got his start in academia, receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, and subsequently running the Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology. Somewhat ironically for my present purposes, Catmull is a bit dismissive of the challenges of academic management. His philosophy in this regard was quite hands-off: get a bunch of smart, motivated people in the same place, and stay out of their way. I have no doubt that running a large company is more complex than running a typical academic lab, but I also thinking that taking a too hands-off approach can still be deleterious over the long run.

Catmull began to think more seriously about management when he returned to industry, first in the form of the Industrial Light & Magic division at Lucasfilm, and subsequently at Pixar. I won't recount the specific episodes relayed in the book, but they contain a fascinating personal history of Pixar and animation, regardless of their value from a management perspective. I wasn't particularly interested in these topics before starting Creativity, Inc., but nonetheless found it a thoroughly engrossing read. Catmull and co-author Amy Wallace also did a good job of writing from a mechanistic view, as the book was anything but a slog to get through. Many of management lessons are illustrated vividly through particular moments of high drama in the life of Pixar. However, my takeaways come down to the following points:

• As a manager, your job is to constantly ferret out problems that keep people from working effectively. These could be problems with them, or with you, but often they will be more systemic than personal. Continuing to scrutinize your process - even, or perhaps especially, when things seem fine - is key to building a healthy, sustainable, and productive culture.
• Seeking feedback is crucial, but also hard. Authority will make people less candid with you, but candor is essential for conducting creative (and scientific) work. Creating an environment in which people can safely yet candidly give others feedback - including you - takes work, but is worthwhile.
• One cannot manage people without delegating important responsibilities to them. However, delegation of authority must be matched with appropriate support. Throwing someone unprepared into the deep end without a floatation device is a recipe for more sinking than swimming, which demoralizes your people and costs you materially as well.

I think all three of these points are very applicable in an academic context. However, I'm not sure if I needed to read 320 pages to get them. Ultimately, I found Creativity, Inc. better as a history than as a management book, because the management lessons are so richly contextualized that the major points are few and far between. The context might help the points stick a bit better, but they also make you forget about why you are reading the book in the first place.

Another limit of Creativity, Inc. is that it focuses on what might be called "executive" or "upper" management: running a large organization of dozens or hundreds of people. Although some management lessons transcend scale, others do not, so this book would probably be more helpful to someone at a dean's/provost's level than to someone running a typically sized research lab.

After finishing Creativity, Inc., I also found out that Catmull's co-founder at Pixar - Academy Award-winning animator John Lasseter - was accused of sexual misconduct in 2017 and ousted from the company. As in so many other cases we've heard about over the past few years, Lasseter's alleged misconduct was so widely known that it was effectively an open secret in the industry. For me, this rather seriously undercuts the Catmull's credibility as a manager. He and Lasseter worked closely with each other for decades, so the fact that Catmull either failed to notice or willfully ignored Lasseter's alleged behavior indicates to me a major failure to protect his employees.

Peopleware

Productive Projects and Teams

By Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister

Originally published in 1989. 3rd ed. (reviewed) issued in 2013. 273 pages.

Peopleware, as the name hints, is a management book hailing from the software development industry. It has been a highly influential guide to managers in this field for 30 years now. It was written by Tom DeMarco and Time Lister - principals of The Atlantic Systems Guild, a consulting firm specializing in managing folks in software development and allied fields. The pair draw on very long careers working with many different firms to inform their management guide. They also include the results of field experiments which - if not quite as rigorous as an academic might wish for - at least give some empirical license to their assertions. The book is divided by topic into six parts:

1. Managing the Human Resource. This part deals with the distinct challenges of managing intellectual workers, as opposed to workers in more production-focused businesses. The authors make the point that the correlation between work time and productivity is much weaker and less sure in the former case than the latter. As a result, they end up advocating for a relatively humane approach: rather than trying to wring every last drop of productivity out of your team by working them for long hours, it's probably better for everyone if you don't expect anything more than 40 hours a week from them. The question of work hours is a controversial one in the academy, as we learn every time this issue flares up on twitter. Personally, I don't subscribe to the Puritan work ethic which equates working long hours with virtue, so Peopleware's message in this chapter aligns nicely with my own perspective (of course, this could just be confirmation bias). If you think your people need to work 50, 60, 70+ hours to be successful in science, maybe read this section to challenge your beliefs?
2. The Office Environment. This whole part of the book focuses on how important the physical environment is to the productivity of your team. Although academic offices rarely look like the miles of cubicles which dotted the corporate landscape when Peopleware first came out, we often work in spaces which are just as bad in their own ways. Fortunate among us are those who have never had a basement office or been housed in some modern art monstrosity crafted more to impress donors than to facilitate research. The authors suggest taking every step possible - including openly defying your employer - to create a space conducive to productivity. Again, the authors also agree with one of my personal biases in this section, by advocating against open-office plans as too distracting.
3. The Right People. This part focuses on the individuals who comprise your team, and discusses strategies for hiring good people (including running them by the rest of your existing team to get their buy-in), and then retaining them once they are there. The negative effects of turnover are described in detail, a lesson well worth considering in the academy where turnover of students is inevitable in the long run, but can at least be mitigated in the short run by minimizing attrition.
4. Growing Productive Teams. Part 4 focuses on the team as a whole, rather than its constituent parts. The authors' thesis is that there are many different things which can make a team successful, but a relatively constrained set of things which can kill a good team. Thus, they focus on various methods of "teamicide" so that they can be effectively avoided. They suggest that by avoiding "teamicide" you give your team a chance to "gel" and become highly effective. I am not sure how well this generalizes to the context of a psychology lab, since they are rarely cohesive teams with a shared goal, and more often a collection of individuals working on related yet distinct problems. However, this advice may still be useful to other, more team-oriented disciplines.
5. Fertile Soil. Part 5 has a pretty broad focus, covering a range of factors which can help a team flourish and a company deal with risk and change. One major focus of this chapter is minimizing distractions to programmers, so that they can enjoy the continuous productive of "flow state" where they are completely immersed in the code. I think these lessons could also be effectively applied to writing (prose rather than code) in the context of the academy, as for many people getting into the flow of writing can be difficult.
6. It's Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here. Part 6 is largely a synthesis/summary of the rest of the book, with some broad management philosophy discussed.

Peopleware was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Some parts are engaging, others drag on a bit; some parts seem applicable to managing an academic lab, others distinctly less so. The book's advice confirms a couple of my preexisting positions on work hours and physical space, which predisposes me well towards those sections, perhaps unfairly.

Despite having been updated within the last decade, Peopleware also feels distinctly dated in certain respects. For example, its main suggestions on diversity and inclusions are to 1) avoid an *all-male* team, and 2) organize an ethnic food night, which, well... yikes. Email is still discussed like a relatively recent innovation, and more recent productivity software like Slack or Tello is not discussed. Popular software management frameworks like agile and scrum are also not discussed.

The Manager's Path

A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

By Camille Fournier

Published 2017. 246 pages.

The Manager's Path was written by Camille Fournier, former CTO of fashion tech firm Rent the Runway, and now managing director at hedge fund Two Sigma. It is tailored to people climbing the management ladder in tech. The book is largely organized around the steps of this ladder, starting with a position of minimal formal authority (mentoring) and ending with executive management. Along the way Fournier considers the new and unique challenges faced by managers as they ascend the hierarchy, including serving as a lead engineer (somewhat analogous to the role of a postdoc in a lab), managing one's first team (junior PI), and managing larger/multiple teams (senior PI), and managing managers (chair/dean). Although the analogies I suggest with the academic ladder aren't perfect, there is a rough mapping of these steps to those a career scientist might tread. At any one time, only one or two of these steps are likely to be immediately applicable to a given person. However, considering the struggles of those above (or below) you on the career ladder can also potentially help you better "manage up" (or down) to them.

Throughout the book there are brief asides in the form of "Ask the CTO" questions, "Good Manager, Bad Manager" examples, and "Challenging Situations". These sections give concrete examples of particular issues that managers may face at each step of the career ladder, and discuss good and bad ways to address these issues. Looking back across all five management books, these concrete examples were a rare and welcome exception from the rather anodyne prescriptions found in many of the other books. Like many academics, I'm not too fond of conflict, and try to avoid it when I can. However, as a PI one has the responsibility of dealing with some types of conflict within one's lab. Thus, I was particularly grateful for the many examples of effective conflict management which Fournier provides.

Another major focus in The Manager's Path was managing oneself. Rising through the ranks - either in tech or academic science - brings with it some changes that many folks might find uncomfortable. This includes the need to exercise (judicious) authority over others, something which many people in tech or the academy - who like to see their organizations in meritocratic or egalitarian terms - might find uncomfortable. The best person to run a software team - Fournier points out - is not necessarily the best coder. Similarly, PIs rarely remain the most technically knowledgeable or skillful member of their lab, beyond the first few years. Growing out of a highly technical role and into a managerial role can exacerbate feelings of insecurity and unworthiness in a competence-related field like tech (something academics might recognize as imposter syndrome). Moreover, the PI may feel that they spend too much of their time away from the "real" science due to new administrative duties. Again, The Manager's Path contains a lot of great advice on how to manage oneself through this transition, staying in touch with codebase (or academic equivalent) while also growing to relish the (crucial) roles of facilitator and visionary.

Among the five management books I read, The Manager's Path was the most recent by a margin of several years. This shows through in numerous ways, and gives the book a much less dated feel than some of the others. Given that so many grad students in psychology will end up in tech, data science, or allied industry fields instead of as a PI themselves, I might suggest this book to early-career folks as a more generally-applicable entre onto the world of managing people than some of the academic-specific books.

Making the Right Moves

A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty

Burroughs Wellcome Fund & Howard Hughes Medical Institute

2nd ed., published 2006. 267 pages.

Making the Right Moves was written as a joint effort by a large team of researchers, writers, and other contributors. It aims to be an all-inclusive primer on how to navigate academic science, covering relevant topics even more broadly than Kathy Barker's Leading Your Laboratory, reviewed below. It begins very early in the process with a chapter on getting a tenure track job and negotiating an offer. The second chapter describes the organizational structure of universities and the general outline of the tenure track. Chapters 3-8 are the most focused on management per se, covering leadership, finding and mentoring trainees, and managing time, projects, and data. The remaining five chapters cover non-managerial essentials for building a successful lab, including getting funding, getting published, tech transfer, collaborations, and teaching.

In many ways Making the Right Moves seems designed to pull back the curtain on the "hidden curriculum" of academia. In this vein it answers a lot of questions which you may have been afraid to ask, for fear of looking foolish for not knowing something "basic" about how universities, research, etc. work. This material is likely to be particularly helpful if you come from a less privileged/networked background (e.g., first-gen, trained at a less prestigious institution, not on Twitter, etc.). However, you're likely to learn something useful even if you come from a highly privileged background like me. The book also answers many questions you may not have thought to ask, such as how the income of a typical university break down into categories such as grants, tuition, etc. I'm not sure how current some of those figures are, given the rapidly changing economic landscape of academia, but at least they make you think.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Making the Right Moves - relative to the other books in this set - is its breadth. Alongside standard topics like how to be (or find) a good mentor, it contains advice on topics ranging from meal planning for your family to the basics of patent law. Although this breadth has many advantages, it does leave the book feeling a bit thin in places. Fortunately, it does contain links to resources both within and at the end of each chapter.

Beyond its broad scope, Making the Right Moves has a couple of other features which make it unique among the management books I consider here. One such features is its collaborative authorship. Since a large number of people contributed to creating this guide - and it was commissioned by a large organization - it feels a bit different from the books written by individual authors. This has pluses and minuses. On one hand, it represents a consensus view that reflects many different perspectives, rather than the opinionated view of any one individual. On the other hand, it is a bit more bland and impersonal in style and substance than some of the other books. That said, there are plenty of specific suggestions in this book, such as a template for providing performance reviews or sets of structured interview questions.

Another unique feature of Making the Right Moves is its advice for medical PIs. There are substantial sections throughout the guide on topics like balancing clinical duties with research, or teaching medical students. Although not particularly useful to me personally, I could imagine these sections being particularly valuable to new clinical psychology PIs (or medical PIs outside of psychology altogether). As I discuss in my review of At the Helm below, there is also an emphasis on the biomedical lab model which may not generalize in all respects to different disciplines.

One thing I did not like about Making the Right Moves was its engagement with my own field of social and personality psychology. In particular, it recommends the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as a tool for understanding your personality. For readers outside of psychology, the MBTI is not a valid personality assessment tool. Despite its enduring popularity in corporate interviews and dating sites, it has been superseded for decades by much more psychometrically sound theories such as the Five Factor Model (a.k.a. "The Big Five") and the HEXACO model (you can take a version of the former on my research site MySocialBrain.org, if you're curious). As I say below in my critique of the inclusion of learning styles in At the Helm, such content makes me question the validity of advice which comes from outside of my expertise (since I cannot examine it as critically).

In general, Making the Right Moves is a strong contender for the most generally useful book on this list. Like other books written early in the millennium, it is a bit dated in places. It is a useful source of conventional wisdom, but perhaps in the process does too much to reify existing (sometimes perverse) incentive structures. However, despite these weakness and the other issues mentioned above, it provides an impressively detailed and comprehensive introduction to managing an academic lab. That said, if one is looking *only* for management content, and not broader information about academic science, then some of the other options provide better focus and/or more detail on this topic.

At the Helm

Leading Your Laboratory

By Kathy Barker

1st ed. (reviewed) published 2002. 2nd ed. published 2010. 372 pages.

Like Making the Right Moves, Kathy Barker's At the Helm deals with more than just academic management - it is a comprehensive guide to succeeding as a PI. It is also among the most popular such books on the market, and came highly recommended by multiple sources. I read the 1st edition of this book, published almost two decades ago, because a friend lent it to me (which was considerably cheaper than the $55 - or $30 Kindle - the 2nd edition currently goes for on Amazon). Since I know that there's a newer edition, I'll try to refrain from commenting on parts of the book which seemed dated, like the chapter devoted entirely to these new-fangled things called "computers", the repeating theme of mentioning secretaries who do your clerical work for you, or the sections on pregnancy, diversity, gender, and lab "romance" which don't hold up too well in the light of 2019. However, I would be interested to see how these things have changed (or not) in the more recent edition.

At the Helm covers almost every topic that a PI would ever need to think about in exhaustive detail. At nearly four-hundred pages, it was the clear winner (loser?) in terms of length among the five books I review here. It's also a bit more of a slog to read than some of the other books like Creativity, Inc. or The Manger's Path. There are a lot of tables and bulleted-point lists which don't make for the most engaging or memorable reading. Perhaps I made a mistake by reading the entire thing on a long train trip? I think that it might make more sense to skim At the Helm lightly, and then read it in detail piecemeal as certain sections become particularly relevant.

Barker covers so much material in her guide that it actually makes it quite hard to summarize. However, major themes include 1) how to find and keep the right people, and 2) how to cultivate a healthy and productive lab culture. The book contains some very helpful concrete advice - such as questions to use in a structured interview. However, it also contains a fair number of platitudes which I found less enlightening.

At the Helm has a number of nice features, such as extensive lists of resources at the end of each chapter that would facilitate a deeper dive into that chapter's content. Another valuable feature are the quotes which pepper the book. Nearly every page has a couple of text boxes feature short quotes from anonymous PIs on the topic of that page. I think these are useful because they 1) provide a sense of how underprepared most PIs are when they start out (you are not alone!) and 2) they give a sense for the (considerable) diversity of opinion PIs hold on most topics. Alhough Barker states her own take on these issues in the main text, she doesn't directly engage with the quotes themselves. I think the book might be improved if she did so occasionally, because some of the quotes feature really bad takes (like violations of federal labor law bad) and should not be presented without comment.

At the Helm is clearly organized around the idea of a biology-type laboratory. Thus it features extensive discussion of things like benchwork and reagents. Some of the advice in these sections has applicability to sciences which lack these things, but if you're a psychologist like me you'll probably find yourself skipping through long passages. The structure and culture of bio-labs is also systematically quite different from what we have in psychology, with the former featuring larger, more hierarchically organized labs. Psychology - on the other hand - tends to be more feudalistic in nature, with each member of lab acting a bit like a mini-PI and developing their own distinct line of research (not universally true, but much more common than in biology). As such, if you're in a field that doesn't work like biology, you should probably think critically about how to apply some of Barker's suggestions to your own lab context.

Just as with Making the Right Moves, the occasions when At the Helm engaged with psychology were ironically some of the things which bothered me most about it. For example, in one section on training your personnel, it goes on at length about learning styles, a notion that remains popular among educators, but which has long been critiqued in psychological circles, to the point of being viewed as a discredited myth by many. Whenever I see these sorts of things, it makes me wonder about advice drawn in from other fields outside of my expertise, and whether it is equally (un)trustworthy.

Overall, I think how much you will get out of At the Helm will depend inversely on how much you're bringing in with you. If you've just been thrust into a PI job having never really thought about how to run a research lab before, it could be an invaluable life-saver. If you've already thought a lot about how you want to run your lab, talked with mentors, attended panels, kept an eye on twitter, and taken professional development courses, then you're not going to find a bunch of additional secrets hidden here. In such cases I would still likely recommend it, but more as a comprehensive "desk reference" to refer back to occasionally than as an urgent read.

The Verdict

So, after reading these books, what would I recommend? Read Creativity, Inc. only if you're interested in a personal history of Pixar and the rise of computer animation - the management content is not sufficiently dense or applicable to justify it otherwise. Read Peopleware to get the most mainstream/slightly old-fashioned management advice in industry. The Manager's Path is what I would recommend to someone very early in their career, like a lab manager or junior grad student. If you've just started, or are just about to start, a PI position, then Making the Right Moves and/or At the Helm are probably your best bet for a one-stop-shop management guide. Given that Making the Right Moves is available online for free (legally) and covers topics like job search and grant-seeking which are relevant even before you have a lab, my overall recommendation would be to start there.

All of these books are (or will rapidly grow) outdated in certain respects, and may have areas where they will not be applicable to your context. Read them critically, thinking about what it makes sense to integrate, and which advice you disagree with or find irrelevant. If you have the luxury of knowing other young faculty and you can organize them into a reading/discussion group, then you will likely get much more out of these books than by reading them alone.

In closing, I will note one major limitation to the reviews above: I haven't actually started my job yet, so I haven't had an opportunity to test any of their advice in my own lab. Time allowing (haha) I will try to revisit these reviews in a few years once I've had some real experience, and share how my perceptions have changed.