Happiness is Success, Waste is a Crime

I just love Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Book, because it shows why things have been designed in the Scrum Framework the way they have and how it is actually based on empirical evidence. Below I have collected some quotes from the book which I find quite noteworthy.

Happiness is Success

… happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving (p.148).

… true greatness is deeply rooted in joy (p.147).

I’ve found the Happiness metric to be predictive. … if you see a team-wide drop in happiness … you know that you have an issue you need to address, and soon (p.152).

So in Scrum, everything is visible. In my companies, every salary, every financial, every expenditure is available to everyone. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to keep this stuff secret except to further their own individual agenda, or to keep people infantilized (p.154).

If you can’t trust the people you’re hiring to be on board with what you’re doing … you’ve set up a system that has failure built in (p.155).

Waste is a Crime

[about multitasking] The ‘Loss to Context Switching’ column is pure waste. … just by doing one thing exclusively before moving on, the work takes a little more than half as much time. Half (p.91/92).

… multitasking not only wastes your time but makes you stupid (p.94)

Half done isn’t done at all (p.94)

Do it right the first time: If a bug was addressed on the day it was created, it would take an hour to fix it; three weeks later, it would take twenty-four hours (p. 100).

… working late wasn’t a sign of commitment, it was a sign of failure (p. 102).

When we don’t have any energy reserves left, we’re prone to start making unsound decisions (p. 105).

So there’s a limited number of sound decisions you can make in any one day, and as you make more and more, you erode your ability to regulate your own behaviour. You start making mistakes – eventually, serious ones. As the Maxwell Curve shows, those bad decisions impact productivity. So go home at five. Turn off the cell phone over the weekend. Watch a movie. Perhaps, most important, have a sandwich. By not working so much, you’ll get more and better work done (p. 106)