Before starting Scrum in 1993, I was involved in multiple technology companies, as well as a non-profit in California led by successful founders of start-ups. We studied carefully several editions of Everett Rogers, "Diffusion of Innovations," and I just downloaded the fifth edition on my Kindle to read again. I was a fan of Joseph Schumpeter's, "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," and even wrote a paper competing for the Schumpeter Prize during my time working with artificial intelligence in MIT Technology Square, the home of the original "Hackers." When I proposed the paper for publication in the Harvard Business Review at a Beacon Hill cocktail party, the editor of this illustrious journal was so offended he refused to talk with me. But those were the days before the internet and even HBR changed after publication of Clayton Christensen's, "The Innovator's Dilemma."
Recently, I watched a fascinating interview with Marc Andreesen at Stanford Business School where he mentioned a book he felt was equally important with Christensen's work. Carlota Perez's "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital" is basic reading for any technology investor and updates Schumpeter's ideas to the internet era. The book holds that the sequence technological revolution-financial bubble-collapse-golden age-political unrest recurs about every half century.
We are in the golden age of the information technology era with political unrest starting to bubble up. And in my latest book "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" we describe how Scrum was used by National Public Radio for their award winning work on the Egyptian Revolution. One of my colleagues sent me a note last week suggesting that some of the Arabs he trained in Scrum might have used it to engineer the Arab Spring. But I digress ... My work on the Schumpeter paper illustrates how innovations take about 20 years to mature, whether it is eyeglasses in the 11th century or TV in the 20th century. So we knew it would take about 20 years for Scrum to revolutionize our way of working. We thought it was for software but now, everything is becoming software. See the Wall Street Journal interview with Marc Andreesen where he describes how "software is eating the world!" (subscription required)
We are even going mainstream in HBO's hilarious new TV series, "Silicon Valley," where the Googles of the world are competing with little start-ups (and losing) each using Scrum as a competitive weapon. It will be interesting to ride the wave as this 50 year technology cycle unfolds.
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