Archives

Tell Her No

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there was a song called “Tell Her No” by the Zombies. I like to play it sometimes in the courses. Here is the song: A simple and stylish song with quite a message. I like to let the music tell the message. I think it reaches […]

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Intermediate CSPO and Workshop

Thanks to Maria Diaconu and Dave Muldoon, and with the help of Catherine Louis and others, we have significantly revised our Certified Scrum Product Owner course. This has been in progress in a way for years. I have long thought that the CSPO course should be treated as a post-CSM course, a step beyond ‘beginner.’ […]

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Lame Scrum Implementations

I was talking to a colleague about one problem, and then said, “but this is not our biggest problem — our biggest problem is lame scrum implementations.” So, I thought I would discuss that. First, truly, our biggest problem is not Scrum or anything to do with Scrum. Our biggest problem is to figure out […]

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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.” […]

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“Leader’s Guide to Radical Management”

I just got a copy of “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management” by Stephen Denning. I recommend it. It is not so hard to learn Scrum and apply it to one team, but I always hear that, in any large-ish organization, “We need to change the culture.” OK then, one way is to read and […]

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Creation myth

It is Sunday morning as I write. I like to read different bibles, from different cultures. It is my intuition that while they are all different, they are also all trying to give us pointers towards the truth. Sometimes the pointers are a bit rusty and bent, but if we use a bit of imagination […]

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“The bad news does not get better with age.”

“The bad news does not get better with age.” I use this phrase, this key principle, several times in my Scrum courses. I say: “Women get better with age, Wine gets better with age And cheese gets better with age, But the bad news, in our business, does not get better with age.” Digression: Some […]

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Lessons from the trenches (of Scrum)

I was talking to a great person at a firm that will not be named. He is in charge of a large implementation of Agile for a large group within a much larger organization. They start their teams with Agile (Scrum) training and a hands-on workshop, and also provide coaching to each team from a […]

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Leadership – 2

“To lead people, walk beside them … As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate … When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’” — Lao-Tsu […]

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Loneliness

I have a book by Rollo May that I have barely started to read: “The Courage to Create.” This seems to me an important topic, creativity, because hopefully it is what I am training teams to do — to be more creative — and what he says is that it takes courage. One aspect of […]

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