Is “Wiring the Winning Organization” a book for you? Read my five takeaways and decide for yourself.

Are you still reading technology books? Or do you get your short-form insights from blogs and long-form perspectives from YouTube videos? While I buy fewer books about specific technologies—the landscape changes so fast!—I still regularly pick up tech and business books that explore a particular topic in depth. So when Gene Kim reached out to me in October about reading and reviewing his upcoming book, it was an easy “yes.”

You know Gene, right? Wrote the Phoenix Project? Unicorn Project? DevOps Handbook? I’ve always enjoyed his writing style and his way of using analogies and storytelling to make complex topics feel more approachable. Gene’s new book, written with Steven J Spear, is called Wiring the Winning Organization. This book isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok. Here were my five major takeaways after reading this book, and hopefully this helps you decide if you should pick up a copy.

The book could have been a 2-page paper, but I’m glad it wasn’t. The running joke with most business-focused books is that they contain a single good idea that somehow bloats to three hundred pages. Honestly, this book could have been delivered as a long online article. The idea is fairly straightforward: great organizational performance is tied to creating conditions for folks to do their best work, and this is done by creating efficient “social circuitry” that uses three key practices for solving problems. To be sure, Gene’s already published some articles containing bits from the book on topics like layers of work, social circuitry, and what “slowification” means. He could have stopped there. But this topic feels new to me, and it benefitted from the myriad case studies the authors used to make their case. Was it repetitive at times? Sure. But I think that was needed and it helped establish the framework.

I wouldn’t have liked this book fifteen years ago. Books like the Phoenix Project are for anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re an architect, program lead, developer, sysadmin, or whatever, there’s something for you. And, it reads like a novel, so even if you don’t want to “learn” anything, it’s still entertaining. Wiring the Winning Organization is different. There are no heroes and villains. It’s more “study guide” than “beach read.” The book is specifically for those leading teams or those in horizontal roles (e.g. architects, security teams) that impact how cross-team work gets done. If I had started reading this when I was an individual contributor, I wouldn’t have liked it. Today, as a manager, it was compelling to me.

I have a new vocabulary to use. Every industry, company, and person has words or phrases of their own. And in tech, we’re particularly awful about over-using or mis-using terms so that they no longer mean anything. I’m looking at you, “DevOps”, “cloud”, and now “observability.” But I hope that a lot of folks read this book and start using a few of its terms. Social circuitry is a great one. The authors use this to refer to the “wiring” of a team and how knowledge and ideas flow. I’ve used this term a dozen times at work in the past month. The triplet of practices called out in the book—amplification (where are the problems) which results in slowificaion (create space for problem solving) and simplification (make problems themselves easier to solve)—should become common as well. The book introduced a handful of other phrasings that may catch on as well. That’s the hallmark of an impactful book.

A business strategy without a corresponding change in social circuitry is likely flawed. Early in the book, the authors make the point that we’ve been trained to think that competitive advantage comes from creating an unfair playing field resulting from superior understanding of Porter’s five forces. Or from having a better map of the territory than anyone else. Those things are important, but the book reinforces that you need leaders who “wire” the organization for success. Having the right people, the right tools, and a differentiated strategy may not be enough to win if the circuitry is off. What this tells me is that if companies announce big strategic pivots without a thoughtful change in org structure and circuitry, it’s unlikely to succeed.

Good management is deliberate. My biggest mistake (of many) in the early years of my management career was undervaluing the “management” aspect. Management isn’t a promotion for a job well done as an individual contributor; it’s a new job with entirely different responsibilities. Good managers activate their team, and constantly assess the environment for roadblocks. This book reminded me to think about how to create better amplification channels for my team so that we hear about problems sooner. It reminded me to embrace slowification and define space for thinking and experimentation outside of the regular operating channels. And it reminded me to ruthlessly pursue simplification and make it easier for my team to solve problems. The most important thing managers do is create conditions for great work!

I enjoyed the book. It changed some of my thinking and impacted how I work. If you grab a copy let me know!