Kevin's Weblog

Why is it that I totally hate project planning at work, but for a dinner party, I’m willing to write page upon page of inventories, tasks lists, and timelines at a level of detail that any sane person would have fired up MS Project to handle? I think this reflects sometime about the relative maturity of the two disciplines. Either that or it reflects that I’m a freak.

On the plane ride back to Maryland yesterday, I read The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. It’s a pretty fast 130 pages, but it definitely seems to fall into the category of management books that have a single insight that they simply repeat over and over until they fill enough pages to justify calling it a book.

In this case, the general insight is that you will be happier if you don’t take on tasks that aren’t (or shouldn’t be) your responsibility. If you are a manager, your reports will be happier too if you don’t take on tasks (monkeys) that they ought to be doing instead. A few techniques for getting out of the habit of picking up monkeys, and that’s basically the book.

Anyways, I’m not complaining too much because I needed something to read on the plane, and this book is a lot more compact than Quicksilver, which had to be relegated to my carry on.