Most people have experienced--at least once in their lives--the incomparable thrill of being part of a great team effort. They can remember the unity of purpose they experienced, the powerful passion that inspired them, and the incredible results they achieved. People who have been on a great team can attest that the difference between being on a team with a shared vision and being on a team without one is the difference between joy and misery.

In 1996, Jim and Michele McCarthy, after successful careers leading software development teams at Microsoft and elsewhere, set out to discover a set of repeatable group behaviors that would always lead to the formation of a state of shared vision for any team. They hoped for a practical, communicable, and reliable process that could be used to create the best possible teams every time it was applied. They established a hands-on laboratory for the study and teaching of high-performance teamwork. In a controlled simulation environment, their principle research and teaching effort--the McCarthy Software Development BootCamp--challenged dozens of real-world, high-tech teams to produce and deliver a product. Teams were given a product development assignment, and instructed to form a team, envision the product, agree on how to make it, then design, build, and ship it on time. By repeating these simulations time after time, with the new teams building on the learning from previous teams, core practices emerged that were repeatedly successful. These were encoded as patterns and protocols.

Software for Your Head is the first publication of the most significant results of the authors' unprecedented five-year investigation into the dynamics of contemporary teams. The information in this book will provide a means for any team to create for itself a compelling state of shared vision.

0201604566B09042001

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 19 Ratings

Some great ideas wrapped in too much padding - 2005-04-19
Reviewer Rating:
I'm a big fan of "Dynamics of Software Development" and I expected this book to be 10 years better than that. It isn't.

It's like buying a favourite band's new CD and finding that you really liked the old work in the days of vinyl. And the CD collects dust.

I bought this book and tried to read it many times. I've willed it to be engaging, I wanted it to be good, I've given time over to reading it, but it's not engaging and feels bloated.

Sure there are some great ideas, but they're fighting to get out of the "stuff" around it.

Looking forward to the next book Jim. I hope it's the one I was looking for.

Teams become real - 2004-07-29
Reviewer Rating:
It'is one of the most wonderful books I ever read about teams. What I mostly appreciate is that talks about teams in a language a developer or an engineer can understand (bypassing the resistances and prejudices that technicians have treating emotions, motivations, groups and so on) and usually it's a nightmare for me to explain them that poor performance are not simply related to task assignments or character or people smartness...
Definitely a great book.

8/10 - 2004-06-26
Reviewer Rating:
I give this book eight out of ten.
What I like about it:
The ideas in this book have enormous power. They could (and can) change the way people work with each other for the better.
The book presents the function that team = product. The better the team works together the better the product. This is so obvious and yet gets constantly overlooked.
The patterns and anti patterns of behavior are very well observed and described.
After reading this book the second time I have been to a McCarthy boot camp and the book does an admirable job of describing what is achievable.
I have tried each of the protocols described in this book and I can tell you they rate amongst the best ways I have discovered of helping teams work well together.
The title describes the book well, it takes some time to work this out. It is a clever idea that we can load new software into our brains and therefore become better at doing something - such as interacting with other people (or even ourselves!)

In order to get a ten:
It would be easier to read. The book is written too much like a software manual. The McCarthy's previous book - Dynamics of Software Development - was much easier to read and proved to be very popular with the development teams I introduced it to. Software For Your Head requires commitment to read to the end.
The examples would be clearer. Throughout the book are stories which serve as examples of the ideas being presented. I often have to read these a second time to get the full meaning of them.

For more of Dr. Neil's reviews go to http://www.Roodyn.com/BookReviews.aspx

Software for Your Head - 2004-05-14
Reviewer Rating:
I've read the book and sponsored several of the Boot Camps in a company. The protocols work and they are not just for any IT or high-tech team as some reviewers have noted. We took groups of Sr. and Executive management as well as mid-management and technical professionals through the boot camp and it really helped solidify these groups and raise their performance level. Several of them then took the BC to their teams. One particular exec takes his team through the BC almost every year.

Yes, there's some pretty deep psychology and maybe a little new age in the text but there's nothing harmful about it at all. The Core protocols are great and I continue to use them all and teach teams these protocols.

The book is a tough read, but worth it. The boot camps are really good and will blow you away.If you really want to jump start a team and get them firing on all cylinders then read the book and get a boot camp quick. It's worth the investment. But I do recommend you ensure it's a fit for your culture. The authors are very knowledgable but will pretty much tell you how it has to be to be successful with the Core and a boot camp. This can be too painful for some organizations but if you really want to change then it may well be for you.

We're humans, not machines. - 2006-09-23
Reviewer Rating:
Most people don't work the way Jim wants them to, don't think that way, and they never will. There're myriads of things in the way of sanity when developing intellectual assets as a part of collective efforts. Yes, we're inherentily egotistical and inefficient. However, this "OS" will not help it. The success of collective efforts will continue to be determined through the good old positives (leadership, drive, personal charisma, excellency of communication), productive negatives (challenge, competition, need for $$$), unproductive negatives (fear, intimidation, anxiety)... and a lot of luck. Not through the protocols and behavior agreements. We're humans, not machines. Since we're humans the only real help we can offer ourselves is investing in our human growth.

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