Waste is a Crime – Jeff Sutherland (co inventor of Scrum) and author of Scrum: How to do twice the work in half the time states he typically sees about 85% of the effort in most companies produces nothing of value, highlighting the ‘inherent insanity and wastefulness of life in a modern corporation.’

Daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and time bound sprints that keep small teams focused are Jeff’s antidote to this.  Make sure your team has built these rhythms into the DNA of your organization using Scaling Up’s 13 week race or an equivalent.

Want to boost your top line?  Companies with more engaged employees dramatically increase revenue per employee. McKinsey and Co’s 2024 and Beyond report reveals that a company at the median of revenue per employee is 95% higher than one ranked in the 26th percentile. As illustrated in the graph below, improved employee engagement leads to improved employee productivity and to dramatically improved revenue per employee.

And on a personal note

I hurt my leg skydiving in mid July and have been grounded for a few weeks, so I’ve been reading voraciously. One of the books I’m reading is Scrum: How to do twice the work in half the time, in which the author addresses the fallacy of multitasking. Based on extensive research by Gerald Weinberg, attempting to focus on more than one task at a time significantly extends the time needed to complete all tasks.

In practice, multitasking can easily double and quintuple the total time needed to complete all of the tasks being multitasked (see table below). It turns out that people who say that are good at multitasking have very short attention spans and like to multitask. They are not good at it.

If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out.