A new collective book, hugging your haters and calendar time management

Welcome to Cultivated Management Newsletter

Hi all,

Welcome to this weeks Cultivated Management newsletter. I normally try to post this on a Friday but I have a very good reason why I didn't this week; I was doing a hackathon at work and was frazzled on Friday evening!

"But you don't write much code though Rob - how can you do a hackathon?" I hear you say.

Each hackathon we try to come up with a project that the "non-coders" can take part in that still has business value. 4 months ago a group of produced a company development handbook for new starters.

This time we created a book for scrum masters.

Hackathons are a great way for people to bond over a common objective, a tight deadline and a shared sense of purpose; they can be a lot of fun.

The book we created wasn't just an internal book for our business scrum masters, but a book for scrum masters and agile thinkers everywhere.

We wrote the book in 48 hours with the goal of having the book live on LeanPub by Friday afternoon. 7 people were involved. We wrote a lot of content. We drew some terrible pictures :) and we had a great laugh creating it.

We published it briefly on Friday afternoon - just so we could say we'd published it :)

We're just doing some final touches to it and organising social media roll out for it, so we've unpublished it briefly.

We're hoping to go live and public with the book for real on Mon/Tue of next week.

The book can be found here: https://leanpub.com/beascrummaster

Keep your eye on my Facebook page, LinkedIn or Twitter for updates.

I hope the book is helpful for people who aren't scrum masters but work in agile too.

Cultivated Management Blog

On the blog this week I published a post about adding work to your calendar. It's an effective time management technique that has made a big difference to my productivity as a manager. You can read the article here.

Hug Your Haters

This week I've been reading a good little book I thought I'd share with you called Hug Your Haters. It's all about how customer service is the new marketing and how companies can embrace haters.

It's not the most riveting of reads page by page, but it does have some very powerful messages and ideas. If you're wondering whether you should focus on providing good customer service, the answer is a resounding YES.

The Social Tester Book On Amazon

I also got around to publishing The Social Tester book on Amazon too. Whoot!

Have a great weekend.

Rob