Reviews and Comments

A great book about rituals and traditions at work. The book explains why rituals are important to shaping a team's effectiveness, a company's culture, and how they can be used to contribute to individual creativity and productivity.

The majority of the book is divided into 5 main areas (Creativity, Performance, Conflict, Community, and Transition) and provides 10 example rituals to try to tackle specific issues or improvements. My company is fully distributed so the rituals can't always be translate 1:1 but the gist is the more important aspect spur your thinking about what you can do similar.

I recommend getting the physical book because there are a lot of drawings and graphics which may not translate well to a digital version.

A good story, but drags and is tedious in some parts; it dives far to deep in details of minor points but then skips over major chunks of the plot, to be back filled with a summary. The story and life of Theo is interesting and enjoyed reading about it, it just could've used editing down to 400 pages instead of almost 800.

The ideas and content in the book are really solid. There are plenty of great quotes and aphorisms to extract from the book. I will probably use it as a reference of sorts, however, as a book I found it hard to engage with the material. It was just a little too preachy and self-help and repetitive. The book is like a string of Medium posts each around a principal, good in small doses but not necessarily a cohesive story or book.

On the author's own recommendation, I did skip the auto biography at the front.

Here are a couple of examples of principals:

> Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what is really true.

> Don’t worry about looking good—worry instead about achieving your goals.

> Don’t let pain stand in the way

> Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone else

A good Hitchcockian thriller, a fun quick summer read.

The story is fairly dark and bleak. It is also quite repetitive, I almost put the book down because it kept repeating the same scenario, but varied just enough to get to the end. It was looking for more details on what happened, though them not knowing, I suppose, is part of the story.

The book is written with a distinct style, filled with dialog but not the customary dialog tags, confusing at times but not overly so. I realized it didn't always matter who said it.

An excellent guide to improve your writing. The book is full of practical suggestions, tons of examples, and is solid writing itself. I've read both Strunk & White and Pinker's Sense of Style and recommend Zinsser's book as the first to read, and then re-read.

A good quick read around product development practices. It was written in 2006, the PDF has been sitting in my ebooks folder for over 10 years. Amazingly, for a book about web development, released prior to the iPhone, it is still quite relevant and good pracitical advice.

The book did not provide me with anything earth shaking, especially if you've been doing app development for awhile; but it is good a collection of still sound principles and reasoning for modern development processes, and project management.