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Note:  Today's Post is from a guest contributor and one of my favorite Agile-ists, Dan Greenberg.  I am fortunate to have been his coach when he first started his Agile journey - and even more fortunate to be his friend. As a Scrum Master, I have good days and bad. There are the days when I feel a limitless surge of energy, when I see my team joking around with one another while getting real work accomplished and having difficult conversations in a productive manner.  The backlog is the holy grail, the sprint is sacred, the team is empowered, stakeholders are delighted, and there is a palpable aura of levity on the development floor. Then, there is the reverse side of the coin when everything feels tense, when the stiff waterfall corporate energy overtakes the room, when every action I take seems to exacerbate the frustration, and I question my abilities, my fit for this position, and my life choices to this point (okay, I’m being dramatic, but trust me it can happen).

Google's Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) expertise comes in dead last. --> The top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: Being a good coach;  Communicating and listening well;  Possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view);  Having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues;  Being a good critical thinker and problem solver;  Being able to make connections across complex ideas For more: http://michiganfuture.org/01/2018/google-finds-stem-skills-arent-the-most-important-skills/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/20/the-surprising-thing-google-learned-about-its-employees-and-what-it-means-for-todays-students/?utm_term=.cc0233cfb3ea

Thank you to Ron Jeffries for stating it so clearly... https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/dark-ecology/ But there is a connection between the 17 old men who had a meeting in Snowbird, and the poor devils working in the code mines of insurance companies in Ohio, suffering under the heel of the boot of the draconian sons of expletives who imposed a bastardized version of something called Scrum on them. We started this thing and we should at least feel sad that it has sometimes gone so far off the rails. And we should do what we can to keep it from going more off the rails, and to help some people get back on the rails. There is no Quality Control on Scrum training or coaching. None, not any, zero. And is what’s being done enough? Not in my book. As long as one programmer somewhere is suffering under Dark Scrum, not enough has been done. And them as has profited from this wave of Agile Enthusiasm is the ones what owes help to t