Hard & Soft: How the Russian information technology market was created (Books column)
I read this book by Boris Shcherbakov, which tells the story of the birth of IT in Russia, but it is rather an ironic autobiographical book about how the management practices of large companies looked in practice in the 90s. This is the story of a man who worked at Hewlett-Packard, Verysell, Party, Oracle and Dell, was at the origins of the Russian IT market and adapted Western management approaches to the local context.
A few moments that decorate the book 1а Corporate governance This is not a set of right words, but a social technology. Top-down goal-setting, task cascading, annual plans, review, employee ranking, personality typology – all this in abstract form sounds like a set of topics from an MBA program. But the author is amusing about how such practices got into specific companies, specific people, and economic turbulence. Some of them didn't work or didn't work as expected - and the author shows that such tools only work together with culture, trust and common sense.
2It’s funny to read about the big ones. corporate mechanicsThis is something that many of us have seen in a later, almost normalized form. For example, performance review with distribution 10% - 80% - 10%: the top is the best, the middle is the bulk, the bottom is the ones with whom you need to do something. On paper, it looks tough, but understandable. In life, questions immediately arise: who really evaluates how people play the system, what to do with a strong team where everything is above average, and how not to turn a management tool into an annual theater.
3️ It feels good in the book that importing practices is almost never literal. You can not just take an American or European management playbook, translate into Russian and get a working company. The market, deficits, habits, distrust, the speed of change, people, connections and compromises of the era must be taken into account. In this sense, the book does not so much teach “how to manage” as it shows how the leader thinks when there is no ready-made answer. On this topic, it is interesting to read about the differences between cultures, which often affects the success of certain practices. (There is a lot about this in the book "The Culture Map". (Map of Cultural Differences)Which I'm talking about. told)
4Tales from 90- They're not decorative. Yes, they're about a time that's long gone: the early computer business, Western companies, the first professional managers, a market that was just assembling itself out of fragments. But it's through these stories that we see the management fabric emerging in the industry: sales, partnerships, accountability for results, fighting for people, trying to build rules where yesterday there were almost no rules.
I liked that Shcherbakov writes without a posture of a person who will now explain to everyone the only true way to lead. Rather, he shares experiences and reflections: where discipline helped, where humor saved, where corporate methodology worked, and where one had to turn on intuition and talk to people as people. Prada, some stories are read as a memory of a long-gone era, and not as a direct recipe for 2026 year:)
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