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Comment by abbadadda | Hacker News Reader

I started listening to "The Unicorn Project" on audiobook. It is not as good as "The Phoenix Project" audiobook, but it does a decent job of describing problems from the software engineer's perspective. The problem is I need a version of these books from Sarah Molton/Steve Master's point of view (a novel about being a product manager or CEO?) to better understand what motivates that side of the org. I have been mired in "The Core Chronic Conflict" for years, paying down tech debt, and turns out changing an org to learn/understand/care about DevOps is Hard.

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I read The Phoenix Project a while back and really liked it, have been intending to pick up the The Unicorn Project for some time now. Did you think just the audiobook wasn't better or in general it wasn't as good as The Phoenix Project?

> Did you think just the audiobook wasn't better or in general it wasn't as good as The Phoenix Project?

I listened to both audiobooks. Something about the paperbacks I couldn’t get in to. Now that I think about it, I don’t want to read a novel about work when I’m not at work. Also, audiobooks lend themselves really well to a commute.

At any rate, the narrator of The Phoenix Project is male and the narrator of the audiobook for The Unicorn Project is female. But that’s not why I liked The Phoenix Project more. The male narrator _really_ got into the voices of the different characters, which I appreciated.

I agree on your review of both books. Phoenix project was excellent. After years of banging my head trying to change a large org, I'm not sure you can do it head on. I found either you need incentives to change, then the org changes. e.g. Rather than encourage goal X, pay or promote teams that do X and it will happen (subject to some level of faking). Or more usually use the current org structure to affect change. i.e. play their game, then use the parts you can to make change. Trying to change an org head on never worked for me and just caused myself and otehrs great unhappiness :).

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