I started reading this book by accident after finding about its existence in discussion thread on X.

The title itself didn’t ring any bells to me at first look, but I decided to get it and read its introduction to get a better sense of what the book was about.

At the moment of this writing I’m ~20% into the book and loving it. It’s the rare kind of book whose the author describes the ins and outs of a particular industry so well that it feels like they were working in the same company as we were, attending the same meetings, talking to the same people and having the same upper management.

We are completely aligned.

And that is a kind of a joy. At many points in the book I stopped and remembered situations I lived in the corporate world that were exactly like the author described.

Of course, the author took his time and had the help of contributors who obviously “refined” the text so it could be even more descriptive and detailed about the intricacies of IT companies.

And it is so dense. Its chapters are not so extensive. They are a few pages long, but each sentence carries a ton of weight. An experienced IT professional could just pull out a chapter of the book and have a full day of discussions with middle managers and individual contributors.

I know a few books with the same characteristics of this one. Two of them are notable to me and fresh in my memory not only because of its contents but also the discussions we had on them at the time of reading at college and later working for consulting firms.

The first one is Igor Ansoff’s “Strategic Management”, a tiny little book but with immense depth into the various aspects of the strategic mind, in the case of the person, and strategic processes for companies as a whole.

The second one is David C. Kuhlman’s “Leading Firms”. I remember reading this one and highlighting parts that were literal descriptions of the things going on at the consulting firm I was working at that time. I could easily copy/paste segments from it into email messages and send them over to my manager if I wanted to impress him. Of course I didn’t do it, but I couldn’t be less impressed with how aligned the book was with reality.

So back to “Month-Man” — which is a great concept from the book that made its way to the title — it’s a great read of you are anywhere within your journey through the IT valley. I though in the beginning that it was only good for software developers but, no!, it’s good for anyone who has ever worked in IT driven organizations.