Scrumming For The Corner Office
Note1: This bogus post was inspired by Bertrand Meyer’s book: “Agile!“. Specifically, the juice is squeezed from chapter 2: “Deconstructing Agile Texts“.
Business gurus love to fabricate crises and instill fear in their deep-pocketed C-level executive clients so they can pitch their latest idea (at $2000/day plus expenses) to “reinvent management!”
Steve Denning is a big-league business management guru, ala Gary Hamel, Tom Peters, Ken Blanchard, Bob Sutton, etc. Even though Mr. Denning has no software background, he somehow got into Jeff Sutherland’s refrigerator and managed to drink a whole pitcher of “agile” koolaid with nary a burp.
In a brilliant marketing move to distance himself from his peers, Steve has jumped on the “agile” bandwagon. He’s been busy advocating the migration of Scrum out of the software development trenches; up the ladder and into the corner office we go. I can visualize it: CEO as Certified Product Owner, COO as Certified Scrum Master, and the rest of the C-suite as second-class, uncertified, “developers“. (Why is there no certification program for developers?)
In closing out this post, I’d like to share with you this brief twitter exchange between Mr. Denning and the lowly BD00 :
Note2: I actually like many of Steve’s ideas: “Who’s Left Standing?“, “Salesmen And Accountants“.