In October I began a month's worth of events in the U.S. and Europe this week promoting my new book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. The first event was a Reddit IAMA. One question I liked:
jf200399: Hi Jeff, we know about the mechanics and the productivity of scrum. But do you like to tell something about the culture in scrum teams?
The culture of Scrum teams will evolve if people work on it to something like a high performance sports team. We liked Rugby videos on the first Scrum team and kept on showing our favorite All Blacks scrum video. We asked what is the difference between us and them. They were totally focused. They had all arms linked. Their mental attitude was they would crush anything that got in the way. When one individual broke through the line the whole team was ecstatic. The first Scrum team said to a person, this culture changed their lives and they would be looking for the same experience again and again for the rest of their life. There were a lot of tears when the team was acquired by another company and had to split up.
“This book cuts through the jargon and pedagogy and gets to the essence of what makes it work.”
–Adam Messinger, CTO, Twitter
Week 1:
I flew to Silicon Valley to meet with most of the leading companies there. I already had pre-meetings with leadership teams from Ericsson, Workday, Cisco, Salesforce.com, Walmart, Visa, Symantec, Adobe, and Intuit, among others. A highlight was the Disruptive Leadership presentation at the Silicon Valley Agile Leadership public meeting at PayPal on Tuesday, 10/7. Stacey and Mary Louie have done an awesome job with their team in organizing four events every day for a week.
“Senior leaders should not just read the book—they should do what Sutherland recommends.” –Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business, co-author of The Knowing-Doing Gap
VersionOne has invited me to Atlanta for a community event on Monday 10/13: Disruptive Leadership: The Power of Scrum with Jeff Sutherland. I'm was excited to meet the Scrum community in Atlanta, which is growing by leaps and bounds. I also spent time with fellow fighter pilots at Afterburner discussing how to better ramp up Scrum teams, particularly those who don't have working software at the end of every sprint.
From Atlanta I flew to Paris for the Lean IT Summit. Original founders of Lean were there and really liked my keynote address on how Scrum was formed. I sold out all copies of my new book.
“Very inspiring speech of @jeffsutherland, creator of SCRUM, today at #LeanIT2014 in Paris."
– Pierre Masai, CIO Toyota Motor Europe
Off to London. Citizen Sigmund of Random House set up a whirlwind tour of interviews and talks. Two interviews at the BBC, morning news at Sky News, several interviews with journalists and magazines, talks at Google, Deloite, and the Cabinet Office. Gov.UK is being totally revamped by a team of agilists. Initial there were 6 people and it has now ramped to over 600. Scrum boards are everywhere. These government employees stayed after work for more than an hour to discuss Scrum with me.
The last two days of the week I did a Scrum Master class with Gabby Benefield of evolvebeyond.com. We had a meetup that was a full house at a local pub. A number of people shared with me that Scrum had changed their lives. Many people had started a new profession or a new company based on Scrum. We sold out all the books again!
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