Scrum

If you’ve ever watched great dancers or gymnasts, you know that their motion can almost seem effortless, as if they’re doing nothing but simply being. They seem as if they couldn’t be anything else but what they are in that moment. I experienced that one day when a diminutive aikido master threw me effortlessly through the air, and yet did so in a

What Scrum does is bring teams together to create great things, and that requires everyone not only to see the end goal, but to deliver incrementally toward that goal.

One, the Product Owner needs to be knowledgeable about the domain. By this I mean two things: the Product Owner should understand the process the team is executing well enough to know what can be done and, just as important, what can’t. But the Product Owner also has to understand the what well enough to know how to translate what can be done into

The important thing, though, is just to begin. Just start. You can see the detailed steps on how to do it in the appendix. Scrum is designed so that you can boot up a team in a couple of days. Get your Backlog, plan your first Sprint, and away you go. You don’t need to devote a lot of time to planning, reflection, meditations, mission statements, o

Everyone Knows Everything. Communication saturation accelerates work.

Then, as the Product Owner, put together a road map of where you think things are going. What do you think you can get done this quarter? Where do you want to be this year?

“People don’t multitask because they’re good at it. They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity.” In other words, the people who multitask the most just can’t focus. They can’t help themselves.

Reflecting on my time at West Point and in Vietnam, I found myself agreeing that leadership has nothing to do with authority. Rather, it has to do with—among other things—knowledge and being a servant-leader. The Chief Engineer can’t simply say something has to be done a particular way. He has to persuade, cajole, and demonstrate that his way is th

Think of performance bonuses or promotions or hiring. Everything is focused on the individual actor, rather than the team. And that, it turns out, is a big mistake. Managers tend to focus on the individual because it makes intuitive sense. You want the best people, and people are different, so focus on getting the best performers, and you’ll get be