The Geek Leader's Handbook: Essential Leadership Insight for People with Technical Backgrounds - Paperback

by Maria McManus (Author), Paul Glen (Author)

Mastering the Art of Technical Leadership As a dedicated leader, you've probably read everything you could on leadership. Many books have been written about it. But you're a technical leader, so it's guaranteed that much of what you've read is incomplete at best, and quite possibly inappropriate. Sure, you can learn a lot by studying ancient generals, sales gurus, or even Steve Jobs, but you've got to remember that Attila the Hun never deployed SAP. The Geek Leader's Handbook recognizes and respects the unique challenges that geek leaders face. It provides both practical advice and a framework rooted in the understanding that:

• Geeks are different.
• Geeks would rather lead technology than people, but only people can be led.
• Geeks have a hard time working with non-geeks, but those who learn to do it well become great geek leaders.

The Geek Leader's Handbook gives you practical, immediately applicable advice tailored to the day-to-day challenges of technical leadership. You don't need yet another laundry list of things you should do. To really grow as a leader, you need a solid framework to understand why these approaches make sense and to empower you to adapt them to your environment. The book also takes an unflinching look at what makes geeks different from other folk. To uncover those differences, co-authors Paul Glen and Maria McManus, collaborated as geek and non-geek. By synthesizing both perspectives, they reveal surprising and liberating insights that will help geeks become great leaders.

Author Biography

Paul Glen and Maria McManus teamed up to write this book from two very different perspectives. Paul Glen is the founder of the Leading Geeks Company. He has spent more than 25 years working on technical projects, leading technical organizations, and helping technical leaders. Since 1999, he has poured his energy into improving the quality of technical leadership as a consultant, author, and presenter.

His previous book, Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology, won several awards. Among them was the 2003 Financial Times Germany International Book Prize, as the best new book published worldwide on the subject of leadership. Since 2003, he has written a column for Computerworld, for which he was awarded a 2007 National Silver Medal for Editorial Excellence by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He received an MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, with majors in marketing, organizational behavior, and strategy. His BA is from Cornell University, with majors in computer science and mathematics. He has also taught as an adjunct faculty member in the MBA programs at Loyola Marymount University and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Maria McManus, a partner at Leading Geeks, spent her career at the intersection between technical, creative, and business people on digital development teams, as a pioneer and leader in user experience strategy and design. As a vice president of the first-generation internet success iVillage and as a director of user experience at Disney Interactive Media Group, Maria accepted it as her calling to bridge the gap between these different types of people in order to create better products more efficiently. In 2011, Maria officially joined Paul to help establish Leading Geeks as the premier voice in promoting geek/non-geek understanding. Having studied English and American literature at Brown University and Mount Holyoke College, Maria's attention to the nuances of subjective experience, highlighting common threads and subtle differences, has significantly shaped the insights of this book.