I’d have to admit that I have been in a slump lately. Work was getting me down. The Scrum Team in our local office has been doing great. However, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle to bring agile practices to the rest of our organization which is heavily entrenched in waterfall and traditional thinking. Things were seeming stale. I needed something to pick me up and get me back on track as a Scrum evangelist.
On Wednesday, Dave Bouwman and I tuned in to a Webex presentation that Guy Kawasaki was giving entitled The Art of Evangelism. Guy is one of my favorite people to turn to when I need inspiration these days. He is the former chief evangelist of Apple and is currently the co-founder of Truemors and the managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. Guy’s message was so upbeat and inspiring. It made me want to get back into the saddle and start evangelizing Scrum in our organization again.
What did Guy say to make me snap back into reality? “The most important thing about evangelism is to make meaning. It’s easy to evangelize and get others to evangelize things that are meaningful…things that change the world, make the world a better place.“ I’d been so entrenched in making Scrum work for the sake of Scrum that I’d forgotten to make it meaningful to everyone in our organization. To make things meaningful, Guy suggests that we:
- Perpetuate good things
- Create good things
- End bad things
I needed to step back and start living those words. They fall right in line with Scrum practices and I needed to hear them again. I needed to get back to affiliating, creating, and associating myself and others with the good things that Scrum promotes. As Guy says “Great stuff is easy to evangelize. Crap is hard to evangelize.“ I sincerely believe Scrum falls under the great stuff category. Time to start evangelizing again…
If you want to watch the Webex of Guy’s presentation, it was recorded and is available at http://www.webex.com/web-seminars/view_recording/662851581.
© Copyright 2007, ChrisSpagnuolo.com GeoScrum! by Chris Spagnuolo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
No related posts.
Leave a Comment