Recommendations based on "Incorruptible"

Most managers fail. Some 70% of employees say they are dissatisfied with their line manager. A shocking 50% are labelled as incompetent, a disappointment or a wrong hire by their co-workers. But, what do we expect when over half new managers are given no training when they are promoted? Becoming a manager isn't a progression; it's an entirely new job. Penguin Expert Series: Managing People is a manual for managers who want to succeed in their new job, motivate and direct their teams and establish a working culture where everyone wants to do their best work. The book condenses Simon Birkenhead's decades of experience working as a team leader. He reveals; what makes a good manager, highlights common pitfalls to avoid, presents his tried and tested 'four-lever framework.' With strategies to activate motivation in your team, set goals and expectations, provide feedback and coaching to building a high-performance culture, and plenty of examples from across industries, this is everything first-time managers need to succeed and be the boss that everyone wants to work for.

In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions-suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Noted software expert Robert C. Martin presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code “on the fly” into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer–but only if you work at it. What kind of work will you be doing? You’ll be reading code–lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what’s right about that code, and what’s wrong with it. More importantly, you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Clean Code is divided into three parts. The first describes the principles, patterns, and practices of writing clean code. The second part consists of several case studies of increasing complexity. Each case study is an exercise in cleaning up code–of transforming a code base that has some problems into one that is sound and efficient. The third part is the payoff: a single chapter containing a list of heuristics and “smells” gathered while creating the case studies. The result is a knowledge base that describes the way we think when we write, read, and clean code. Readers will come away from this book understanding How to tell the difference between good and bad code How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes How to format code for maximum readability How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic How to unit test and practice test-driven development This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.

Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a "position" in a prospective customer's mind-one that reflects a company's own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. Writing in their trademark witty, fast-paced style, advertising gurus Ries and Trout explain how to: Make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market-and stays there Position a follower so that it can occupy a niche not claimed by the leader Avoid letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one.Positioning also shows you how to: Use leading ad agency techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household name Build your strategy around your competition's weaknesses Reposition a strong competitor and create a weak spot Use your present position to its best advantage Choose the best name for your product Determine when-and why-less is more Analyze recent trends that affect your positioning.Ries and Trout provide many valuable case histories and penetrating analyses of some of the most phenomenal successes and failures in advertising history. Revised to reflect significant developments in the five years since its original publication, Positioning is required reading for anyone in business today.

This book provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day. Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do and how loyalty programs really affect loyalty, How Brands Grow presents decades of research in a style that is written for marketing professionals to grow their brands. It is the first book to present these laws in context and to explore their meaning and application.The most distinctive element to this book is that the laws presented are tried and tested; they have been found to hold over varied conditions, time and countries. This is contrary to most marketing texts and indeed, much information provides evidence that much modern marketing theory is far from soundly based.

Refactoring is about improving the design of existing code. It is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure. With refactoring you can even take a bad design and rework it into a good one. This book offers a thorough discussion of the principles of refactoring, including where to spot opportunities for refactoring, and how to set up the required tests. There is also a catalog of more than 40 proven refactorings with details as to when and why to use the refactoring, step by step instructions for implementing it, and an example illustrating how it works The book is written using Java as its principle language, but the ideas are applicable to any OO language.

Strategic Monoliths and Microservices helps business decision-makers and technical team members collaborate to clearly understand their strategic problems, and identify their optimal architectural approaches, whether those turn out to be distributed microservices, well-modularized monoliths, or coarse-grained services partway between the two. Writing for MBA and IT students alike, leading software architecture expert Vaughn Vernon and Tomasz Jaskua guide you through making balanced architecture compositional decisions based on need and purpose rather than popular opinion, so you can maximize business value and deliver systems that evolve more easily. Throughout, the authors provide realistic application examples, showing how to construct well-designed monoliths that are maintainable and extensible, and how to decompose massively tangled legacy systems into truly effective microservices.

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects   The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org–the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber–Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies.   The Nexus™ Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows how Nexus helps teams to deliver a complex, multi-platform, software-based product in short, frequent cycles, without sacrificing consistency or quality, and without adding unnecessary complexity or straying from Scrum’s core principles. Using an extended case study, the authors illustrate how Nexus helps teams solve common scaling challenges like reducing cross-team dependencies, preserving team self-organization and transparency, and ensuring accountability. Understand the challenges of delivering working, integrated product increments with multiple teams, and how Nexus addresses them Form a Nexus around a new or existing product and learn how that Nexus sets goals and plans its work Run Sprints within a Nexus, provide transparency into progress, conduct effective Nexus Sprint reviews, and use Nexus Sprint Retrospectives to continuously improve Overcome the distributed team collaboration challenges

'Ridley is spot-on when it comes to the vital ingredients for success' Sir James Dyson Building on his bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject. Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine. Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations - from steam engines to search engines - how they started and why they succeeded or failed.