---
title: "[Book of the month] Behind Closed Doors : Secrets of Great Management"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/12/19/book-of-the-month-behind-closed-doors-secrets-of-great-manag.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/12/19/book-of-the-month-behind-closed-doors-secrets-of-great-manag.html"
published: "2005-12-19T15:29:00"
updated: "2005-12-19T15:29:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Behind Closed Doors : Secrets of Great Management (Pragmatic Programmers) Having been reading this book by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby all night and getting about half way, I can say this is one of the best,…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# \[Book of the month\] Behind Closed Doors : Secrets of Great Management

By Roy Osherove December 19, 2005

**Historical article** · Originally published December 19, 2005; technical details may be outdated.

[![](https://osherove.com/img/wb/50f40080_images.amazon.com_images_P_0976694026.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
Behind Closed Doors : Secrets of Great Management (Pragmatic Programmers)](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0976694026/iserializable-20)

Having been reading this book by [Johanna Rothman](http://www.jrothman.com/) and [Esther Derby](http://www.estherderby.com/) all night and getting about half way, I can say this is one of the best, simplest management books I've read. It really does shed light on the day-to-day behavior of a great manager, and is filled with practical advice, HOW-TO and especially "How Not To"s.

I wish some of the managers I've known in the past have read this (including myself in a couple of projects!). "Behind Closed Doors" wins my "book of the month" club award (which usually means it says on for several months until I finish the next one...)

_PS_

Book links made with [The Amazoner](https://osherove.com/)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/