hello I'm here to talk about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness a great American dream that's often not fulfilled in the words of the poet Robert Burns the best laid plans of mice and men often go terribly wrong and lead to pain and suffering instead of the promised hope I first started to wrestle with his problem as a cadet at West Point we went through a lot of pain and suffering in our training and in the last year I was there they made me the training officer for company l2 because they had a marching
problem on the parade field company l2 was known as the loose deuce because for a hundred years they had a tradition of mediocrity sloppy performance for decades people had tried to get them to march longer train harder but nothing worked so I knew I had to do something different so what I decided to do is I couldn't tell them what to do but I could put up in the bulletin board at night and color coded notes exactly how their performance was in the parade field and exactly what they needed to do to improve you know
Charlie has got to stop sticking his sword in the ground in the middle of a parade the 3rd platoon has got to turn the corner in synchronization and the commander has to enunciate his commands crisply in exactly right timing to everyone's amazement they became the number one company in the Corps of Cadets within three months and General MacArthur died at this time and he had specified there must be a company cadets marching behind his casket to lay him to rest and l2 was chosen so for dead last to putting out one of our greatest generals
in the gray was a long journey in a very short period of time now I graduated from West Point and I went into the Air Force while I was at West Point I learned something from other leaders I lived in a room which were then had a plaque on the mantelpiece it said general dwight d eisenhower slept here and every time I'd read that plaque I'd remember his famous quote plans are worthless but planning is everything so when I got to be a fighter pilot I was in reconnaissance we did a lot of planning but
one day one of my fellow pilots at a de buri was blown out of the air over Hanoi by a SAN missile and I said to myself he did really good planning but he was flying straight and level over the target that could get me killed from that day forward my plan was to have a vision where the target was and as soon as I crossed North Vietnam I went into an evasive maneuver because every second I knew I was being fired at and only at the last moment would I come up straight level offer
a target just for a second to snap that photo now I got out of there alive over half the people like fluid did not come back from their missions and when I came back to the United States it was a big surprise I had come so close to getting killed so many times it felt like it was a new life every day was like a bonus day a free day and what was I going to do with it so I asked the Air Force to send me back to the Air Force Academy to become a
trained to be a professor or back to school at Stanford trained to be a professor at the Air Force Academy and from there I went into the University of Colorado Medical School I was on the faculty there for 11 years while I was there my expertise was building supercomputer models of the human cell and showing how it evolved and multiplied and what caused it to become cancerous what what could make that stop how do we cure cancer and while I was there a big banking company running a hundred fifty banks all over North America came
by and they said you know at the University you have the best expertise in technologies we use at the bank you have all the knowledge and know that none of the money but at the bag we've got all the money and we don't know what we're doing you should come work for the bank and it would be a perfect marriage of knowledge and money and they made me an offer that my wife couldn't refuse a poor university professor so I wind up at the bank and what do I see I see they're running all these
huge projects hundreds of developers and they manage all these projects with a Gantt chart and this is a technology that was introduced to the military of the United States in 1910 it didn't work very well in World War one and it didn't work very well then because every piece of the project is lined up with a date and if anybody misses that timing the whole project is delayed and when it gets delayed the customers get upset the managers get angry that would force these developers to work nights weekends they go on death marches it reminded
me of the rome and aliens you know the slaves were growing the whip is cracking but as a fighter pilot I knew the essence of the problem these guys could not land a project you know we learned as a fighter pilot that we had very carefully bad that airplane right on the end of the runway and if we did it we might go halfway down the runway and slide off the runway into the trees and that's what they were doing every project sliding off the runway into the trees so I went to the CEO and
I said this Bank is totally screwed up if you give me the worst business unit in the bank I will fix it just like I fixed company l/2 and he said Sutherland if you want that headache you've got it so I said ok I will report to you once a month to you in the senior management and the rest of the time you stay out of my unit we're gonna run this as a little company in a company like a start-up and so we broke them down into small team sales marketing installs engineering everyone all
working together with team incentives in a collaborative space and we ran weekly cycles we began building a backlog of what we needed to do and I began to show them how to lay in the airplane how is it that a pilot can make a perfect touchdown he has to look at altitude airspeed rate of descent the heading of the airplane understand the wind and the weather in every few seconds being adjusting constantly so every week they would try to land the airplane at the end of the runway bang and week after week they did it
and surprise surprise in less than six months that team was the best team in the bank they had gone from the worst money-losing unit to the most profitable using in the bank because they made their work visible the team was given the responsibility to fix the problem and they self-organized to make it happen it's all about learning how to land the airplane now from that banking experience I was asked by a series of companies to come in and deal with tough problems so I needed to figure out how to do this consistently and get other
people to do it other than me I couldn't be there all the time for everyone and so I began to think about how would I do this I was running a little French company in Cambridge Massachusetts on the I on the MIT campus and five graduate students for MIT came by and they said we're starting up a company building robots can you rent us some space and I said sure we have a couple of extra rooms you can use for a lab and they were building these insect-like robots and every other day the robots would
come wandering into my office they were trying to hunt me down with heat-seeking sensors and a senior professor at MIT was a co-founder he would come by on Fridays and he would see how they were doing and I asked him I said professor Brooks how do these robots work and he said Jeff the first thing you understand need to understand is that for 30 years we've tried to build a smart system at MIT and it's been a total failure we tried to build this command and control system with really big computers and huge databases and
it didn't work it the best it could do was a smart chess program so we said I watched insects and I wanted to create something that had distributed intelligence a chip in the leg that can move a leg a chip in the spine that can coordinate legs a neural network in the head that figures out where to go and he turned it on and the legs flapped and it waddle to its feet it was like a baby learning how to walk and in three minutes it was running around the room I said wow that's amazing
I used to have these really slow developers maybe we could give them some simple rules and they would learn how to boot up into a super-intelligent team do you think that work and he said why don't you try it well I did a short time later a company a very successful company hired me in to build a new product that was going to replace all their old products and half the time they'd ever done it before and I had to figure it out and our product had to be used by really big companies and I
had to tell them how to use the product in an agile way and we studied the literature and we found the best paper in the Harvard Business Review where Nonaka and Takeuchi two japanese professors had shown three different styles of leadership number one the Gantt chart you know what happens with that one number two a transitional strategy at Fuji Xerox and number three that what they saw and the best manufacturing plants of the world so we ran how to implement number three and tocking Tanaka said it needs to be self-organizing self-motivated teams management needs to
let go and step back they need to get out of the way so the teams can figure out what to do so we implemented that in 1993 by 1995 I got together with my partner Ken Shui burr we started rolling it out to industry in 2001 we wrote the agile manifesto and since then it's gone everywhere in the world all the major software companies they're building fighters agriculture machinery space probes so just as in the picture there is showing a car company how to build a car in one-week cycles a new car every week but
the leading edge of this agile movement today is actually in the schools of the US and Europe I recently visited a school in the Netherlands where the kids have been trained to self learn the bell would ring they'd come running into the room T's of four they would run to the wall put up their scrum boards on the wall they'd have a short daily meeting what did we do yesterday what would we do today what are the problems that are getting in the way run to the desk and start to work the teachers de standing
there saying nothing they only talk when they're asked for help the enthusiasm of these kids was so overwhelming I'm standing there with other teachers we're crying the kids say it's faster learning better grades they finish weeks early they have more fun that's a definition of fun for everything they do they make sure it's achieved the handicapped children are involved naturally in the workings of the teams as team members the motivation problems go away the Disciplinary problems go away the team executes self-discipline if they need a little help from the teacher they might ask for it
but generally they don't need it so this is the future of learning and if you go back into the world that most of us live in we're not operating that way the surveys show that most people think work really sucks the only thing worse at work is being sick in bed I recently asked a software developer for working on BMW software in Paris how he liked his scrum team he started choking up he started bursting into tears and he said I can't tell you the exhilaration I feel it's changed my life every one of you
could experience that you could grab back your power grab back your freedom gain a life that's transcended and the exhilaration you would feel would give you an a happiness that you would remember until your grave that's what I wish for every person in this room and you need to give up and let go to make it happen thank you very much [Applause]
