Dilbert is not a cartoon strip. It’s reality!

I’ve been reading about “agile software development” as part of my preparation for a conference I’m planning to attend. Software development used to be my profession. (Today, I have two: 1 – Having fun. 2 – Writing. But number 2 is really just a subset of number 1.) Reading about “agile software development” both takes me back to the world I used to be in and takes me forward to the world we are all rushing toward.

I’ve been reading about “agile software development” because they’re still talking about it at the upcoming conference. They were talking about it back when I used to do software development full time. But nobody I knew ever actually tried to do it.

An explanation in order.

The people who invented this immensely hopeful title got together in a resort setting to do it and wrote “The Agile Manifesto”. Here’s the first “Prinicpal”.

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

Not profits. Not power. Not even technology. Writing great software!

This was written ten years ago. And it’s still a headlined idea at a conference being held with Microsoft’s enthusiastic sponsorship. It certainly didn’t match any of my experience in the last 25 years of my working career.

Who are the guys who wrote this? As it turns out, they are all consultants, speakers and they write books. Does the phrase, “ivory tower” come to mind? No, I don’t claim that they never do any personal development. I’m sure they do. What I claim is that they don’t represent anything even close to what happens in the mainstream, day in and day out.

These ideas attracted as much attention then as they do now. Ever hear of W. Edwards Deming? When I was in management, it was easy to go to a conference and listen to speakers tell you how great his ideas were. (The power to be able to skip off to a conference was one of the perks of being in management.) What was hard was trying to get any of these ideas to be actually put to use once you got back.

Another view of Microsoft can be found in a very recent article in the New York Times by former Microsoft VP, Dick Brass. (Microsoft’s Creative Destruction, February 4, 2010). “… the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.” Unfortunately, Dick Brass’s view corresponds to the way I see Microsoft heading. And it matches my own personal experience perfectly.

In American corporations, there seem to be two kinds of people. People in power and people who need a job. And “power corrupts” still seems to be a law of nature. Steve Ballmer, the guy in charge of Microsoft now, has been there for a very long time, has always been “the marketing guy” and is thoroughly “in power” now. Bill Gates is gone. I watched IBM die from internal rot after career IBM salesmen like Opel and Akers put image and power way ahead of ideals.

And this brings me to the future. As I browse the “Agile Manifesto” web pages, I see that many … maybe even most … of the people now commenting and saying that they “believe” are from India, VietNam, Russia, Poland, Brazil …