Books by author: Tom DeMarco

Peopleware, as its subtitle states, is about creating productive projects and teams. The authors present good data about how important the physical work environment is to knowledge work (like software development), and their observations about corporate "space planners" hit the mark perfectly. I'm fortunate to have a private office with a view, but many of my coworkers are stuck in cubicles or cramped shared offices, and there doesn't seem to be much of anything that a manager can do at my company to improve the work areas of his/her employees. It's very frustrating, and the work suffers for it.

The parts about getting a team to "gel" are descriptive, but the authors offer precious little along the lines of positive actions to take. They do, however, describe some pitfalls to avoid.

This is a straightforward, well-written book with worthwhile content, but I have to take the authors to task for their botched application of entropy as an analogy for uniformity in the workplace—they get it exactly backwards (entropy is a measure of disorder, not "sameness")!

This is one of those books that seems to just be common sense, but apparently isn't. It is clear that businesses that are 100% efficient cannot be flexible or innovative, and that it is not a good idea to be "lost, but making good time". However, it's not clear what concrete steps can be taken to improve the adaptability of a company in today's world. I'll certainly be giving it a lot of thought, and this book points a few fingers at areas to investigate, but few if any answers are given in its pages.