I’ve always loved reading books and I have always found my inspiration there. It doesn’t matter if they were novels or non-fiction books – I’ve learned a lot from them and they’ve had a great impact on my way of thinking and on my entire life.

My fellow blogger Dimitar Nikolov has shared his top 10 list of life-changing books and has tagged me to do the same. The meme was started by Rayna Tzvetkova (in English) and I was so inspired by this idea that I created my own book store. It is the ultimate place where you can find the books I like and I highly recommend. There are not so many books there for now since I have read most of the books in my life in Bulgarian and they are not sold by Amazon but I am going to add there more titles regularly so please, visit it from time to time and take a look at the books listed there.

It is very difficult for me to select only 10 books because my life is constantly changing and there have been always books that have driven the change. At least the change in my mind. So I will share with you some titles and authors that have inspired me through time in different areas of my life.

Software development and Project management

I started my career as a software developer and at the time I thought I was pretty good at writing software. What was my surprise when my brother brought me Steve McConnell‘s books Code Complete and Rapid Development! It was a true revelation! After reading them I finally understood that software development is not writing code for fun but a real industry with its own business rules and if you want to be a true professional you have to know them and follow them.

The software industry is very indicative of the importance of the people who work there. There are still a lot of people who think that making software is technical work and they are very, very wrong. Making software is a very delicate business of making some people work together as a team. Thinking of them as of replaceable parts of a big machine brings Death March projects which are prectable failures. The software development world invented the word Peopleware, which is how you manage and motivate a team of creative people.

Business and Entrepreneurship

I worked as an employee for about 20 years. I have always dreamed to start my own business but I was always afraid to jump into the deep waters justifying myself that I didn’t have enough money, connections, partners, or ideas. At the end of my career I was a regional manager of an U.S. software development company in Bulgaria. Then the company bankrupted and we were all laid off. Then I realized that it was exactly the right moment to start working for myself.

Fortunately, I had some savings so I didn’t worry about the incomes at the beginning. But I was still afraid – I had no one around me to follow as example. Then I started reading books on starting up your own business, how to develop it and how to market it. Guy Kawasaki‘s books Rules For Revolutionaries and The Art of the Start are still like Bibles to me along with Seth Godin‘s The Bootstrapper’s Bible, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and The Dip.

Personal Growth

The next step in my personal development was to realize that the most important thing in life is to open your heart, to accept and enjoy all the good things that happen to you, and to learn from the bad things because this is what makes your life worthwhile and makes you happy.

I came to realize that there is a tight relationship between the quality of your (spiritual) life and your wellfare. When I feel happy and my soul is free then my business goes better and I am getting richer. When I am angry with the world and I feel miserable then my customers run away from me. The book Beyond Code by Rajesh Setty is the perfect example of this statement and this is the reason why I put it in this category. Although intended for IT professionals, this book teaches us how to be better people and thus being more successful profesionals. And books like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina really changed my life for better.

Novels

Of course, as a normal person, I read and find inspiration in novels as well as the non-fiction books. There are books which I can open at any time at any page and start reading them with great pleasure because they are full of life, love, forgivable sins, and a little mystery. Such books are Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I will be glad if the following people join this meme and share their list of life-changing books: Rajesh Setty, Liz Strauss, Steve Pavlina, Dessy Boshnakova, Polly Kozarova, Craig Brown, Pawel Brodzinski,  Pavel Donchev, and Nikolay Yordanov.

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I found this very interesting post in the Predictably Irrational blog (via Bas de Baar) where the author asks the question: Which is the best form of motivation – cash or gift?

I don’t think the word “motivation” is appropriate here – I firmly believe that money is not a motivation but rather hygiene factor in the work environment. I think “reward” is more appropriate word in this case as rewarding is a very powerful instrument in the manager’s hands for showing appreciation to the employee’s work and thus, indirectly to influence on the employee’s motivation.

Back to the main question: Which is better – cash or gift? I think there is no simple answer. I love the proverb that one size doesn’t fit all and I think it applies here, too. Some people like to be in control of their lives (or at least to think they are in control) and they would prefer having the cash so they can decide by themselves how to spend it. Giving them the cash shows them that you respect their right to make decisions, their freedom to live their live as they want to and I believe that this will increase their loyalty to you and their motivation to work better.

On the other hand, there are people who need to feel your attention, they need to know that the company and the manager care for them and thus giving them a gift shows them your special attitude. Giving a gift means you have spent some time thinking about the other person while choosing a valuable present.

While this mindset is individual, it is also strongly dependent of the national culture. There are countries where most people would appreciate the present and other countries where most people would prefer the cash. So when you make a decision about the form of reward, take in consideration the person’s mindset and their national culture.

In my country, for example, most of the people would prefer the gift even if it is much less in value that the cash. The Bulgarians have an external focus of conscious, i.e. we look for the reasons of everything happening in our lives outside of us. We always need somebody else to take care of our lives and we always hold the others responsible for our destinies.

The national culture plays a very important role but don’t forget that there are also many exceptions! The important thing to know is that there is no best way – it always depends on the person you are dealing with so in order to find the right way to reward them, you must know them quite closely, as the great managers do.

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I wish to myself and to all of you a happy and successful new year. It is gong to be a very important year of my life and I wish myself to be strong enough to stand the test and to reach the goals I set. I hope that the next year will be fruitful and rich for all of us.

Happy New Year!

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These are my favorites:

• Thinking outside of the box
• At the end of the day
• Maximize leverage
• A leading provider of…
• Scalable, Sustainable, and Robust
• Bring a lot of value to the table
• Best of breed
• Improve ROI

You can see the full list and you can add more cliches here.

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People quit their boss, not their job.

Nothing more to add.

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Yesterday I saw a great post in Penelope Trunk’s blog – 10 ways to make people hate you at work. She presents a very colorful list of ways to be nasty. You should read it. My favorite one is “Being obsessed with your workload” and I an going to share some thoughts about it.

I don’t know if this is a matter of culture or education but when I first faced with such behavior I was shocked. I’ve been working in some small companies before and it was my first collision with the corporate culture. It was the first and the biggest software corporation in Bulgaria. It was held by U.S. owners and it was announced as the first software company organized in “the American way”. My case was pretty simple: I was a developer at that time and I had some technical problems, which I couldn’t resolve myself. I needed help and I asked one of the senior guys, known as a “big expert” for a help. Then he answered: “I am a very important person and my work is very important. Your work is not, so I can’t waste my time solving your problems.”

I had never seen such attitude in my career before that and I was astounded. Later on, in the same company I saw many more examples of such behavior and I understood that this is a part of the corporate culture. Before that I hadn’t seen people working with headphones on, now I see them everywhere. I understood that people involved in intellectual work (such as software developers) need privacy and should not be interrupted frequently because their thought process cannot be restored easily and every distraction causes them a lot of time to get back on track but still don’t understand what kind of person should you be not wanting to help your mates?

Now I am a manager and I have a superior manager. He is a direct manager of four people like me and not only doesn’t he respond to my e-mails but sometimes he doesn’t read them at all explaining that he is so overloaded with work that he doesn’t have time to read or answer my e-mails. I am still wondering: if you are a manager and you don’t have the time to manage your subordinates because of too much work, what kind of work would it be?

I will highly appreciate your comments on this topic.

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I was very surprised. I have many books about improving personal life, the road to success and getting rich, and all of them postulate the same mantra: “Work more to succeed!” Now I see that more people in the US start valuing the good life now instead of money and some hope of a good life forty years later.

I have always believed that the good manager should not work more than three hours a day. It sounds like heresy but I really believe that if you are a good manager then all your business should run as a well-lubricated machine and you wouldn’t have much tasks. All you would have to do is to solve some unpredicted problems. Most of the time you should communicate with people and think about the future development and improvement of your business.

I don’t understand how a manager can work fourteen hours a day and don’t accept it. In fact, it means you are not able to do your job if it takes so much!

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