Happy New Year! SPaMCAST 424 features our interview with Penny Pullin. Penny returns to the SPaMCAST to discuss her new book Virtual Leadership: Practical Strategies for Getting the Best Out of Virtual Work and Virtual Teams. Virtual teams and therefore the need for virtual leadership is a critical success factor for delivering value in the 21st Century. Penny's Bio: Dr. Penny Pullan's latest book is Virtual Leadership: Practical strategies for getting the most out of virtual teams and virtual work. Writing it involved immersing herself in the virtual world and listening to countless stories of success and, all too often, disaster! Penny works with people in multinational organizations who are grappling with tricky projects: uncertain, with ambiguous requirements, stakeholders who need to be engaged and teams dispersed around the world. When they work with Penny, clients notice that communication, collaboration, and confidence grow and projects don't seem quite as tricky as before! Penny is a Director of Making Projects Work Ltd. in the UK and tweets at @pennypullan. Penny has offered SPaMCAST listeners a great offer! Virtual Leadership coupon for 20% off VLF20 at www.koganpage.com which includes post and packing in the UK and the USA. Re-Read Saturday News In this week's re-read of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (Jossey-Bass, Copyright 2002, 33rd printing), we review the chapter titled Understanding and Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions. This chapter is the most hands-on portion of the book, and I suggest spending time with the wide range of ideas Lencioni peppers throughout this section. Next week we will conclude this Re-Read with final thoughts. If you are new to the re-read series buy a copy and go back to week one and read along! I am running a poll to decide between Carol Dweck's Mindset, Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) and Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). I have also had suggestions (in the other category) for Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Adam Grant) and Management Lessons from Taiichi Ohno: What Every Leader Can Learn from the Man by Takehiko Harada. I would like your opinion! (last day 1/1/2017) [polldaddy poll=9605629] Takeaways from this week include: Exercises are a great way to teach theory, but practical application makes it stick. Build trust or nothing else will work for long. Experiment with ideas to overcome dysfunctions and measure their impact on RESULTS. Visit the Software Process and Measurement Cast blog to participate in this and previous re-reads. Next SPaMCAST The Software Process and Measurement Cast 425 will feature the ideas from our annual tune-up blog entries. We need to strive to be more effective and efficient every day or the world will pass us by! Next week I have some suggestions that have worked for me. We will also have columns from Gene Hughson with more on leadership. Gene's ideas dovetail nicely with the concepts Penny talked about this week. We will also talk with Steve Tendon about Chapter 14 from his book Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance. Chapter 14 is all about Kanban, flow, and throughput. Shameless Ad for my book! Mastering Software Project Management: Best Practices, Tools and Techniques co-authored by Murali Chematuri and myself and published by J. Ross Publishing. We have received unsolicited reviews like the following: "This book will prove that software projects should not be a tedious process, for you or your team." Support SPaMCAST by buying the book here. Available in English and Chinese.