Have you ever felt vindicated and inspired at the same time? “First Break all the Rules” by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman did that for me. I loved it. If I were to ever cuddle a book… well, you get the point. The general philosophy of treating everyone differently based on their individual skills and personalities is so elementary, but it goes against traditional management ideology which state to treat everyone the same.

The case studies in the book, which make up the majority of the content, are good illustrations of managers in the wild. The Gallup Organization performed a study of over 80,000 managers in approximately 400 companies and profiled the most remarkable as examples of proper managerial behaviour. Managers across a very diverse industries share common issues with their teams, there are challenges to any discipline. The key principles set out in the book - define talent, skills and knowledge for each role; find talented employees and treat them like individuals; measure performance and give feedback; make sure your staff has the right tools to perform their jobs; don’t be controlling and trust your team; really make sense and in practice are useful tools.

The ghost of companies’ past needs to let resource management die and evolve into performance management. Especially when trying to attract top talent in competitive markets such as software, games and web, it’s not a bad idea to be “that place with the wicked managers”.