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Managing Humans - Rands in Repose

Posted June 27th, 2007
Categories: Corporate Life, Writing, Blogging, Management

I’ve been doing a lot more reading than writing the last few months. I’m inspired to write again today after seeing that one of my favorite bloggers has just published a book and released it this week. The book is actually a more formal version of his entire blog worth of thoughts, and probably more. Either way, I’m ordering a copy for myself and can’t wait to flip through it.The blog is Rands in Repose by Michael Lopp, and his new book is called Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager.

Stumbling onto Rands

About 6-8 months ago I stumbled onto a post Rands had that just cracked me up. Something about ‘What To Do When You’re Screwed‘ just made me want more, so I started to dig into the archives and see what this guy was like. I was hooked after spot-checking a few more posts about N.A.D.D. and Agenda Detection so I just decided to start at the beginning and read or skim through this guy’s entire last five years of articles.

Now, normally during any given week I’ll surf the web and come up with a bunch of great articles that I want to write about myself. Reading Rands’ archives made me want to just keep on reading to the point where I’d hear a little voice in my head saying “just go read a couple more of his posts, you can always write your stuff later…” Madness, I’ve never been quite so mesmerized by someone’s blog since I went through Joel’s a couple years back. It literally took me a few months to get through Rands’ archives, mostly because I kept reading even the stuff that wasn’t interesting just because I wanted to know more about the author and loved his style of writing. He’s got a great sense of humor and writing style, that I’ve found myself doing the same things.

Turning your blog into an opportunity

I wanted to give a little exposure for this guy because I really think the audience of this blog (yes, I still actually have quite an audience according to my logs) would enjoy his material. Secondly, I’d like to point out that this guy has really done things right by building almost a brand on his old net handle. He started a blog, let it grow over time by adding valuable thoughts (and plenty of other not-so-valuable tid-bits, but they’re pretty funny either way), then formally bound them all into a book that people can BUY (read: CHA-CHING!!!) and read. This is a perfect example of how someone can make an indirect income as a result of their blog.
Sure, there’s plenty of people out there that have published books about their related blog material…I’m sure they’re interesting too. None of them have ever made me want to do the same though. Not that I’d write a book about IT or management, but everyone has so much in life to contribute for others to learn from or laugh at…it’s a shame I haven’t tried already.

So to wrap this up, a big thanks to Rands for sharing his thoughts with the world via web and paper. (I’ll probably refer to him quite a bit going forward.) And to everyone else out there, take a peek at his site if you haven’t already. He’s definitely a worthwhile RSS subscription.