Appelo, Jurgen. Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools, and Practices to Motivate Any Team. New York, NY, John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Management, Jurgen Appelo writes, is too important to be left to managers. In Managing for Happiness, Appelo provides a dozen principles and practices that (almost) anyone can implement at work to create a happier workplace.
Some practices are harder than others for non-managers to implement. For example, the chapter, “Merit Money” discusses compensation strategies that non-executives would find nearly impossible to put into effect. Non-managerial leaders might implement delegation boards and delegation poker with some difficulty. But other most of the techniques, like value stories, culture books, feedback wraps, and personal maps, could be introduced by anyone in an organization.
Each chapter does double duty, introducing not only a practice, but the principle behind that practice. Readers will come away from the book not only knowing what they want to do, but why they want to do it. The end of each chapter provides suggested variations on each practice to spur the reader’s imagination.
The book’s form factor is its only drawback. The physical book is printed in landscape format, with each page being 9.5” wide. That makes it a little unwieldy to hold at times. Even hardcore fans of hard copy might prefer to get it in an electronic format.
Agile leaders, regardless of their job title and role, will find most of the games and tools in this book to be useful in their Agile practices. The “Moving Motivators” game, for example, will illuminate team dynamics so that the coach can better identify not only what motivates individuals, but the team itself. The “Learning Grid” is a great retrospective technique (Appelo even includes commentary from a Scrum Master to that effect). And the “Happiness Door” combines two common Agile practices to gather feedback and identify team happiness in one exercise. Managing for Happiness adds practical tools to the Agile leader’s toolkit.
Sam Falco 