front matter
This book came from the confluence of several seemingly disconnected events. I was about ready to prepare a fifth edition of Be the Master, an independently published book on choosing your own success and growing that to help others. I was also looking to revise Let’s Talk Business, another independently published title focused on making business basics more accessible to technologists and other individual contributors. Finally, Manning reached out and said that they wanted to create a new “soft skills” book, one designed to help technologists with the non-technical aspects of their careers. The timing seemed perfect, and so this book—through several iterations and many revisions—was born.