Category Archives: Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra quotes

As some of you may know, my sense of humor, such as it is, finds Yogi Berra quotes both entertaining and educational.  I use some of them in my classes. My hope is that the humor allows people to remember things a bit better.  Or in some other magical way, helps learning. For those who […]

The Four Key Things

In my courses, I strive for four key things. I want you to believe “I can do it.” I want you to have some clue about the direction and what you want to do. I want you to be scared. Yes, scared. At least some. “If you wait for perfection, you might wait too long.” […]

Leadership – 1

Takeuchi and Nonaka have written an article on “The Wise Leader” in the Harvard Business Review. (May 2011). Since they are the godfathers of Scrum, one feels compelled to discuss leadership in the context of Scrum. First, we must note this is a big topic, and with somewhat different issues depending on the size of […]

Implementing Scrum when not everyone is a believer

How do you implement Scrum in an organization where not everyone is a believer? Umm. This is a common question and a hard one, and yet also easy. First, one misconception is that Scrum is a religion that only true believers practice it. Scrum is actually empirical. Now, it should be said that Scrum (and […]

Dear Rob – 2

Rob, as some readers may recall from the first post, is a made-up character, representing a typical senior business executive, responsible at a high level for the Agile initiative — among his many other duties. Perhaps the CEO (although probably not a CEO at the Jack Welch level at GE). In this post, we talk […]

CSM Course + ARP Workshop: Why So Successful?

At the insistence of my good friend and colleague, Catherine Louis, I started doing Certified ScrumMaster courses (two days) followed immediately by a one-day workshop. This experiment (which it was for me at first) has proven completely successful. I am now convinced that this is the best way to learn Scrum. Period. And I am […]

How I teach – 1

For those who will teach and for some puzzled course attendees, I want to do a series of posts about how I teach. First, the goal is not to teach. Or, clearly, the goal is neither teaching nor learning, but results, more than just action, but actual results from action). Results for you, for your […]

Some Agile Principles

Let’s discuss some agile principles. I often say the dance steps will be ugly if you don’t feel the music. There is a heated discussion now about the principles that underlie Scrum. I hope no one hurts himself.  By which I mean, in jest, that we often have the biggest fights about abstract things. On […]

How do we know we have a good idea?

How do we know? I was reading the new book by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman recently. Recommended. It’s called “Scaling Lean and Agile Development.” In the beginning of the book, they give lots of ideas about “how to think.” At first, I found this curious, although the suggestions were very good. Only today did […]

What to do first?

I just got an email from someone who recently went to one of our Scrum courses. (Note: This is a long but, I think, interesting post. Bear with it if you can.) QUESTION: Hi, Let’s say one is going to work as a team lead for a software project in an organization that currently does […]