August 2011 Archives

I think I was pretty lucky with my choices for sessions this year at Agile 2011 as I was able to take a number of things of interest from almost every one of them.  I've summarized talks by Christopher Avery and Stephen Denning in other notes, as well as some additional books for my reading list. This posting includes the remainder of my notes from the conference.

One of the things that I love about attending Agile 2011 is the rapid-fire exposure to new ideas.  In particular, I usually get enough book ideas to fill up my reading list for a good part of the next year.  This year, I am certain I will not get to all of these.

Here are the books that I made note of this year. 

Two sessions that I was really looking forward to at Agile 2011 were Making the Entire Organization Agile and Creating Customer Delight by Stephen Denning. My first exposure to his work was through his 2010 book The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. In it, he discusses how some companies are changing their structure and purpose to follow agile and Scrum principles in order to create customer delight and success.  Coming from an agile environment, this made a lot of sense to me and it was very interesting to see how this scaled outside of engineering and into the entire enterprise.

I think the most rewarding session I went to at Agile 2011 was Coaching Success: Getting People to Take Responsibility & Demonstrate Ownership by Christopher Avery.  There were a number of reasons to attend this session, including a recommendation from a friend based on a session at Agile 2009 and the applicability of the topic as our team becomes more focused on assisting our growing customer base. I didn't enter with a notion of what to expect or exaction what I wanted and this likely put me in the right frame of mind for his introduction to The Responsibility Process.

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell

Summary: An investigation into the conditions that lead to successful individuals and why traditional assumptions about intelligence, personality, and effort are only a part of the picture.

Intended Audience: Widely accessible book for those curious about why some are successful and some are not