Team of teams

Big fan of this book.

It's about how to enable huge, complex teams to be adaptable at scale.

It deep dives into 2 main strategies:

1. Creating shared consciousnesses so that folks at the front lines have a very high level of information and context.
2. Delegating decision making so that senior leadership don't bottleneck, increasing speed, adaptability, and empowerment.

Lots of fantastic, well placed anecdotes from: the fight in Iraq, US companies, NASA, historical books, and the author's personal life.

It takes a bit to get going but warms up by chapter 6 on org structures, which is fantastic. Loved chapter 8 on the O&I meeting structure, and chapter 11 on a leader's role on a team of teams.

It's not immediately drag-and-drop applicable to software teams, but that's also what's so good about this book, as the tactics from a different context (the war against Al Qaeda) spur thought on what methods you could apply to software teams and how you might adapt them. The strategies are generalized enough to last for decades.

I would give 4.5 stars. Going to round up as this is just so well written, with such interesting, practical examples. The best book on empowerment at scale that I've read yet.