Very helpful for new to mid level managers

Lots of stories resonated with me in my journey as a manager. it's helpful to listen to Julie's lessons in her trials and errors, and most of the lessons hold true in real world management. Each person's unique quality impacts your management style. Not all good managers are the same, yet the things we experience and love are all similar. It is overall a journey of growth in understanding oneself and understanding all others around us.

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Reaffirming

Loved this book. As a new leader, this book helped my understand that what I was going through was normal and gave me tips on how to better harness that energy. I immediately used tools to give feedback and the process was much better. Great story from someone who went through the ranks.

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So relevant!

So many great tips on managing, motivating, and coordinating teams, with great examples and case studies thrown in to highlight some of the theory. Based on the authors experience as a young new manager of a small team, growing into a passionate and experienced manager of many at Facebook. Great book.

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Good overall

Good book. Has lots of little management lessons. Some of the tips seemed obvious having already worked under managers for a long time.

Narration was good but didn't feel as authentic or easy to follow as the actual author.

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Tangible tips

A well written guide that helps frame the real pain points of what makes a manager, that resulted in it feeling relatable and understanding although I'm a manager on a much smaller scale. It also provided some good insights into how to solve many of the problems.

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Author loses her points in autobiography.

The title of this book suggests it was written to help new managers from Zhou's experience. The book on occasion does make valuable points towards this. But these points are difficult to distil because they are so heavily wrapped in Zhou's unrelatable autobiographical stories. It is clear from the way she shares her lessons that she is banking on the people 'reading' (listening) being highly interested in social media and silicon valley. And though yes, technology (adjacent) businesses are taking the present and future, not everyone finds stories about Facebook's early beginnings all that magical, and the very vast majority of us don't benefit from "on days when you don't feel so great, just remember that blog post you wrote the other week may change someone's life". Zhou overestimates how enchanted her peers - or those interested in management - are with social media, and dresses her practical lessons in far too many silicon valley anecdotes.

She does have valuable insight, and I feel she would have really benefitted from clearly separating her wisdom from her experiences; either by writing two separate books, or dividing her book in chapters that were purely one or the other, rather than a constant mix of the two. This is purely because many of her experiences are not relatable and so end up clouding the universal point she's possibly trying to make.

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9 people found this helpful