If you only read one book this year, it has to be this one, Great Boss, Dead Boss! I saw Ray Immelman speak at the TOC ICO Word Conference in Miami last October. His work came highly recommend from Alan Barnard. So I thought there had to be something in it worth learning. I didn't get around to reading it until this past month due to the recent upheaval in my personal life. So when January came, I started riding the bus to work rather than battling the SR-520 bottleneck to Redmond. It was worth the sacrifice.

This book has changed the way I think about organization and communication down, across and up. If management is about two things then organizational structure and communication are perhaps the two most basic. Great Boss, Dead Boss has made me rethink both of those. I'm deliberately not telling you what the book is about because that would spoil it for you. What I can say is that it takes the form of a novel similar to Eli Goldratt's The Goal. However, despite the fact that Ray Immelman is part of the TOC community and works for Realization Software, this is not a TOC book. It's a book about people, about relationships, about affiliation, motivation, loyalty and leadership. It's a book which is very applicable to the agile community. If agile's unique contribution to software development was the inclusion of people related factors then Great Boss, Dead Boss offers us that same contribution for management.

And finally, if you recently went through a merger or acquisition or are about to then you cannot miss the advice in this story of the merger of two silicon chip manufacturing companies. [Buy it from Amazon at 15% off]