What makes a good technical manager?

Is it possible to engineer the perfect boss? Google was up to the task and found data that will forever change the keys to getting promoted.

A few people posted, quoted and retweeted this INC. Article on my social media streams. The “Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.” is a good list and set of checkpoints.

For me though, as longtime readers will know, I’ve long been a believer in the non-technical manager, most of my best managers and executives were managers first and technical second. On one post on Facebook it summed it up as:

A good company employs managers to manage the company for employees, and employees for the company.

If the company doesn’t have senior technical non-manager positions and technicians are becoming managers to get promoted, you and the managers are at the wrong company in the first place.

I’d tried being a teamlead very early on in my career, it wasn’t good for me or the team, but then I was just 25-years old. Later on, not being a manager became a source of pride, making it through the corporate ranks at IBM without ever being a manager. My mentoring/career presentation has it on slide-2 and slide-10.

These days I think I’d be a good manager, my patience has certainly improved, I’ve achieved everything and more, that I set out to do, and while I’m still technical, I know my boundaries and wouldn’t want to cross them.

Mobility Forecast: BYOD and EMM in 2016

Tom Kendra from Dell Software Group, VP of Systems Management sits in the next isle over from me in Round Rock, such is the way of cube life, from time to time I overhear him on calls and meetings. This is a great summary on cio.com of what I’d heard him say, and the urgency he’s been driving our team.

Back in the day – way back

I suggested to @adamclyde we take a twitter conversation about the gray area between personal and corporate blogging offline, into email. In my response to him, like some “grumpy old man“, I started by recalling the good old days when my URL’s were emea.ibm.com/(something) then ibm.com/s390/corner and later ibm.com/servers/corner.

Later I went looking and found some of my webpages from 2000 on the Internet Archive. I was even more delighted find they had some of my old presentations. I didn’t check through all of them, but my V2 Corner is here. I’ve taken one of my better presentations from the Internet archive and posted it on slideshare.

Enterprise Workstation Management - From Chaos to Order

The PDF version doesn’t have all the overlay colors right, and some of the embedded graphics are missing, but it’s still worth looking through for both content and style.

 

If Google can celebrate it’s 10th anniversary by reporting it’s 2001 index, well how about letting me get away with reposting a presentation from 1996 that originated in 1989! The presentation has it’s origins in 1989 as a Lotus Freelance presentation printed on real overheads via a plotter. It covers the management of workstations and PC’s in corporate environments.

This version is dated from June 1996 and was recovered from the Internet Archive. Some of the colored overlays are the wrong colors and some of the graphics missing. I still think its worth taking a look through for both style and content. I got the summary slide wrong, but not by much as we move to what some are calling Cloud Clients