Practical books for the decisions, conversations and everyday work that come with being in charge. Ten different jobs, with 103 rules for each.
Find your bookStart with the job you've got. Each book takes a different part of working life, from your first team to the decisions that shape a whole organisation.
Everything they should have told you before giving you a team.
The individual manager-direct report relationship: expectations, delegation, one-to-ones, coaching, everyday feedback and careers.
Because avoiding them is not a management strategy.
Persistent behaviour and performance problems: diagnosis, difficult conversations, conflict repair, fair improvement and escalation.
Less theatre. Better work.
The team as a collective: purpose, roles, interfaces, working agreements, meetings, shared decisions and distributed collaboration.
Fewer gut feelings. Fewer expensive surprises.
The hiring funnel from role need to independent new starter: sourcing, assessment, selection, offers and onboarding.
Get it finished. Not just nearly finished.
Finite delivery: business case, scope, estimates, dependencies, governance, risk, acceptance, recovery and handover.
You do not need to be the smartest person in the room.
Software engineering judgement: architecture, code, testing, releases, reliability, incidents, security, developer tools and AI-assisted work.
Fix the system. Stop feeding the fire.
Recurring service and production work: demand, queues, capacity, standard work, quality, suppliers, operating cost and continuity.
Build something people would actually miss.
Product value and viability: customer problems, research, strategy, discovery, prioritisation, measurement, experiments, pricing and lifecycle.
The job changed. Nobody gave you the instructions.
Enterprise-level leadership: strategy, finance, resource allocation, organisation design, managers of managers, governance and stewardship.
A launch email is not a transformation.
The human adoption of organisational change: impact, sponsorship, participation, communication, barriers, retraining, rollout and sustained use.
103 Rules is a series of practical management books created and edited by Andy Edwards. Each book takes one management job and the problems that come with it.
The chapters are short enough to read between meetings, with recognisable situations and something useful to do about them. Each rule ends with a KEEP THIS line: a judgement, question or instruction worth taking into the next working day.
Pick up a book when a particular problem turns up, or read it from the start. Each rule is a short chapter, rather than another framework you need to learn before you can use it.
