# The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

This was good and I read it forever ago and don’t actually remember that much aside from “people need to have honest, hard conversations about how & where they spend their time at work.” Instead, here’s a couple of stories about it.

First, this book was originally recommended to me by someone I managed, who framed it as “I think this will help with some of your management challenges.” He said this as if my management challenges were a regular topic of discussion rather than an out-of-the-blue declaration of fact. I wasn’t super eager to read it, but when YOUR DIRECT REPORT is telling you to read a book on the subject of how you are managing them, there’s no clear way to say “nah, I’m good.” So that’s how I “decided” to read it.

Years later, I saw it on the bookshelves of a CEO. I was newly hired junior senior management - important enough to meet regularly with the CEO 1:1 but unimportant enough that I could quietly cancel many installments without him noticing. He didn’t have a large bookshelf, only five or six books in an office where everything was just so. In an early conversation, I took a swing and told him it was exciting to work for a CEO who had read and enjoyed The Phoenix Project. He looked at it, smiled, and very casually said “Oh, that? It’s just for show, I don’t know anything about it.”

I would soon realize that this was a microcosm of working for that charlatan - everything we did was only for appearances, no substance. It’s no longer a business, sold in a fire sale after playing a Price is Right-style game of “how close to fraud can you get without going over the line?”

PRETTY CLOSE IT TURNS OUT.

Good book. Highly recommend.