I think the thing that everyone needs to really think about deeply is what can they be really passionate about? What do they really want to do? And the second thing they need to really think about is what are their talents, what are their skills? What do they have the ability to do? Because if the passion is not linked to some ability to execute, you can't be successful. And the third component of that is how can you really help a lot of people? Because even if you make a lot of money, if you make it by actually making people have a worse life, you're not going to be happy. So you really need to think about how you're going to be successful at performing a service to a lot of people. And it's the intersection of those three things that people need to figure out now when you're young, you don't really know. But I knew when I was eight years old that I was going to go to West Point, the U. S. Military academy. I just knew that, and through a series of events I wound up there. West Point is the leading leadership training program, I would say, probably in the world. So you study all the greatest leaders in the military setting, and you're taught, your job is to move beyond where you came from, beyond your family, beyond what you are. And your job is now to provide a service, in West Point's case to the country. And you're being trained for that. These are the qualities that you need to have to make that a reality, And that is drummed into you every day. You're there four years, and at the same time, you're thinking about what do I really want to do. And I decided that what I really wanted to do because Air Force at the time had 10% of the class, they were recruiting. And I told them if they made me a fighter pilot, that I would do that because that's something I could get excited about. And so I went into the Air Force I flew R4s for many years. I flew 100 missions over North Vietnam, and I learned a lot about the world, a lot of bad things as well as good things which really altered my perspective. And when I came back from that experience, I really wanted to alter my trajectory in life. And the military had a program where they would send you back to school to be a professor at the Air Force Academy in the case of the Air Force. So I signed up for that. They sent me to Stanford. I spent several years at Stanford working on mathematics and AI, but the courses I liked the best were in the medical school, and, I talked to one of my mentors who was actually a student of my father-in-law. He was one of the leading professors at Stanford, and he was a mentor to me, and he coached me. I thought that maybe I want to go back and be a doctor and he said, "Well, don't do that. That's going to side track you for many years. You need to build on what you already know. Everything needs to be a building step, brick by brick." And so what I decided to do is go to the Air Force Academy as a Professor of Mathematics. I decided that okay, I won't be an MD but I will finish my doctoral degree at the nearest medical school. And I will use all my experience both as a fighter pilot and as a mathematician to focus in on medical research and that led to a career where I wound up as a Professor of Radiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. And I was funded every year, millions of dollars to do research on mathematical and computer simulations of the human cell to try to figure out what causes cancer. And the way I got into that is again, I went to a medical school Grand Rounds talk by a distinguished professor, a guy named John Bailer. And he had just written a published a paper showing that more women were dying of cancer induced by radiation than were being saved by mammography. And that was a shocking finding that was causing a major disruption in the medical community. But I thought Dr Bailer is really speaking the truth about an important issue and he's causing change. So I went to him after his talk and I said, Dr Bailer, I'm just a graduate student here. I'm really concerned that I'm going to spend five years writing a PhD thesis, and it's just going to wind up on a library shelf gathering dust and no one will read it. But you, when you write something, everybody has to read it, and it causes change in public policy. Can you guide me in the direction to write something really worth writing? So I think for your students, they really need to think about mentorship. How can they talk to people who can really guide them in a way that would help them make a major contribution? And because of Dr. Bailer's direction, we actually figured out that at the time, the medical community was completely divided on what caused cancer. We figured out the model that is now the conventional model for cancer today through that PhD work. Now it just so happened that to figure out how a cell works, you really have to understand complex, adaptive systems. So understanding dynamics of systems theory and how systems evolved. Once you understand at the cellular level it is just as valid at the human person level, and it's just as valid at the team level. Now, after spending 11 years, mostly in the Department of Radiology at the University, School of Medicine, a big banking company came by and they said, Jeff, you guys have all the knowledge on certain computing technology that we're using. But over the bank, we have all the money, and they made me an offer that my wife couldn't refuse. And I wind up with a bank, effectively as the CTO for 150 banks. So now I'm thinking, How am I going to build step by step. brick a brick? As I am working on the future technology, I'm looking at the bank. I noticed all their projects are late, and I look at the tooling they're using for projects, and they're are using these Gant charts, which was a technology that was invented before World War I. And it hasn't been improved since. And I did a mathematical analysis. If you have 1000 tasks, everyone with a name and the date, what is the probability that an important task is delayed and makes a project late, and that probability is virtually 100%. So I went into the CEO's office and I said, Ron, have you noticed that all your projects are late? And he said, "Yeah, every day at least five CEOs called me up. They scream at me." I said, "Well, it's not getting any better because every time they are late, the managers have more meetings and more reports that makes them even later." So he says, Well, what should I do? Well, I happened to have a grant that the bank was supporting at the time, a leadership grant with a Kellogg Foundation that I applied for. I was traveling around the world, mostly with people from academia, and I was in a subgroup of business school professors, and we had been thinking about - how do you move large companies forward? Large companies were losing their innovative edge. Large companies who are just a cash cow that is bleeding out. How do you transform industry? And we decided that you need to be able to build an intrapreneurial venture inside of the large company, but it needs to be a different operating system and it needs to be shielded from the rest of the company. And there was a book at that time that explained that. There were two books I was using training my banking managers. One was "In Search of Excellence," a book about the best companies, and it described this process. And the other book was Peter Drucker's book on "Innovation and Entrepreneurship." So I was trying to train these people in the bank, particularly the managers, to think differently. So I said to the CEO, We need a different operating model for the bank. This operating model is going to incorporate all I learned as a fighter pilot, and all I learned as a research scientist studying complex adaptive systems. It's going to be small teams working together. It is going to involve everybody in the business unit, all working as one set of teams, we were going to have a Product Marketing come in at the beginning of the week on Monday and build a backlog prioritized by business value, and on Friday afternoon we deploy everything that we talked about on Monday. I got the people together and I said, I'm going to train you how to land a project, just like I taught fighter pilots to land an aircraft. And we're going to throw out the Gant chart. I'm going to give you a Burn Down chart that shows exactly where you are in the glide path. And I know the first few weeks you're going to have trouble. Just like fighter pilots. They always come in high. They have to go around, try it again. We're going to practice until we can nail it. Within six weeks they were nailing the project at the end of the week, and within six months it was the most profitable business unit in the back. And that was the prototype of what today we call Scrum at Scale. And so, in recent years, we say we started in 1983. And since 1983 I built on that prototype until today scrum is used all over the world. There are millions of people meeting this morning having a daily scrum meeting to figure out how to do what we did in the bank back in 1983. And it was all about building systematically on what you learn, and listening to your mentors finding people who really know about life, about whatever is domain you're in medicine or business, and then following their leadership and then putting your shoulder to the wheel to really help people in a big way. And that is the key to success. So I would say most students they're thinking about How can I help myself? Helping yourself is not the solution. The solution is how can you make a major contribution to everybody else? Because if you figure that out, then other people are going to want to help you, right? And it's really through other people's help that you're really going to be a successful person and make a significant contribution. So that's a kind of a mini snapshot of the way I think about all of this. And I've been very fortunate in the world that basically, today scrum is about 80% of what people call agile. Agile transformations are going on in the business. They're going on in academia. They're going on in government. There are literally tens of thousands of organizations right now trying to change their operations into a more agile way of working and 80% of that is scrum. So I'm very happy that I've been able to actually help people do what needs to be done to be more successful in this modern age where we have more technology, more speed, and need to help people work together to have a better life and be more successful. Because one of the problems was, in order to solve this project management disaster, which still exists in many companies, people are unhappy, they're under pressure they're failing, their companies are going out of business. They're having heart attacks. Their health is bad, they're under command and control micromanage leadership. They're being told to do what to do. They're treated like slaves. This is a system that doesn't work, and it has to be flipped into a completely different dimension where people collaborate together and they help one another. They're working. They create an environment that they like to work in. They work at a sustainable pace. They have time with their families, but they do it in a way that they're 2 to 4 times or eight to 10 times more successful than the people that are living in the micromanage control slave environment. Okay, so my goal is to free the people to make them really successful, have a better life not only in business but with their families. Many families are using scrum, particularly with their children. One of the most interesting implementations of scrum is actually in the high schools started in the Netherlands, using scrum to do all the teaching and the kids in those classes they finish the semester six weeks early, their grades are 20 or 30% higher. And you go into one of those classes and the kids are tremendously enthusiastic. They really love it. They tell me, Jeff, "I don't know why you using this with adults because scrum is perfect for teenagers." Okay, so that's my passion. And my recommendation to your students is the first thing you need to do is find out what their passion is. It's what can they get fired up with? Because if you don't have fire in your belly, you will not achieve great success. Once you figure out where that fire is, then you need help. You need guidance. You need mentorship. What do you have personally as your talents, your strength that can leverage your passion. And then you need to look to everybody else. How are you going to help them out and move from being focused on yourself, to focus on making a contribution that's going to make lives better for others. Okay, that is a fundamental switch that has to go on.

Well from that first prototype of today what we know, it's grown it's scale, in 1983, I was CTO and sometimes president of 11 different companies. And in each company I improve the model. And in 1993 I was the vice president for Object Technology at, a company called Easel Corporation. And I was effectively the chief engineer for the new products we were developing. And we needed a way of formalising everything I learned from the original prototype in 1983 and all these companies had gone through, formalize it in a way that we could actually show our customers how to implement it. And that formalization became known as Scrum. I then worked in several more companies where I was again, either president or CTO, actually, deploying the standard model scrum until in 2006 I was actually helping a venture capital group, coaching there companies, the venture capital group had decided that they were going to use scrum to radically improve investment performance, and they were going to use it and every one of their investments, and they were going to use scrum to run the venture group. And they were going to get a company wide. It was not going to be just something for a project or an IT temp, its going to be an organizational wide scrum that they were going to train the senior management of all their investments. And as I was helping to do that, the CEO of the venture group said Jeff, another mentor. He said, Jeff, you need to formalize and publish everything you've learned over the last 20 or 30 years, and you should start a company to do that. And you should bring what you've learned to the world in a big way because even though there are thousands of scrum masters out there and and many, many hundreds of scrum trainers, they don't know what you have taught us in the venture group. And the venture group has had huge success. One of their latest successes is a company called Data Dog just went public last November, and the stock has exploded during Co-Vid and I figure they had got about a 30,000% return on investment. Just that one company. So the message from the CEO is and he really twisted my arm. He tried to make me feel emotionally bad if I didn't form a company and start publishing and, and also moving scrum out of it was largely in the IT Community moving scrum out into an organizational model for running organizations and make them successful because that's what we're doing in the venture capital group with our investments. We're training everybody, including the senior management. He said, Jeff, you owe it to the world to set up a company that's totally devoted to them. And he said, I have a checkbook here, I'll write, whatever check you tell me how much and I will write it and sign it. But I said No, I know if you invest in me then I will be, I will owe you for at least the next seven years, So I don't want any investment. So he said, Well, our venture group will incubate you do whatever you want. You can have space. You can have support. We started right in the venture group, so that was the beginning of Scrum Inc. and over the years Scrum Inc. has evolved to, where we have a subsidiary in Japan, Scrum in Japan, we started a joint venture called Scrum at scale. We've built out a training community of hundreds of traders, all over the world. I was meeting with some of them last night in Thailand, 9:30 at night. I've got a 100 scrum people in Thailand trying to, you know, change the country of Thailand with scrum, So I have those three scrum companies, but I also have a medical research company which I'm not even going to talk about here, which absorbs a tremendous amount of my time, but basically that effort was started at the university colorado, Medical School where I was a professor for over a decade, where I founded a Center for vitamins and Cancer research under the sponsorship of Linus Pauling, the only person that ever won two Nobel prizes individually, and he felt he should have gotten the 3rd one, he showed me in his living room table, the model of DNA was like 80% complete. And he said he shared his data with Watson and Crick and they published first. He says, I should have had three Nobel Prize, Now Linus, was this probably the smartest person I've ever met. He was like a walking encyclopedia of, Congress. And he had a radically different view of the world. And his message to me is that the whole direction of conventional medicine, while it may be useful in the short term, in the long term it's not focused on, line's first Nobel prize was for chemistry, so he viewed the body as a chemical factory. And he said, If you put drugs in the chemical factory, those are farn poisonous substances that ultimately are not the solution, what we need to do is change the distribution of the components that are normally running in the chemical system of body such that they balance out the body in a way that the body is free from disease, healthy mentally, very thoughtful acute mental capabilities. The physical, really good physical strength and agility, all of these things can be done by modifying the natural substances which are in the chemical system called the human body. So, basically, his message to me was, you need to completely change, your thinking from the conventional model to a completely new model, that's the model of the future. And this would be another lesson for your students. Whatever they're seeing today in business, in academia, in medicine, it's ok for what it is today, but, it's going to say 50-100 years. But things have changed so fast in 10 or 20 years. What we know today will be completely obsolete. We knew when I was in medical school that 50% of the publications in the leading medical journal, the New England Medical Journal, 50% would be proved wrong in the same journal within five years. Today it's faster. 50% of what Dr Stick today will be proved wrong within three years. And your students need to get that okay, 50% of what people think is, like, totally wrong. And how are they going to figure out what, 50%, the 50% of what they're thinking in their head? How are they going to get that out of their head and get new thinking in there, that is going to take whatever they're doing to the next level. Okay, that's what Linus taught me, okay. And that had a tremendous impact on scrum, and it also has a tremendous impact on my medical research, which continues to go on in the background. That's a whole separate company. So what am I doing? Every day, what is the priority? Okay, what is the priority with these three companies with my medical research with the hundreds of trainers we have all over the world. So, I'm doing a lot of work right now just on the financial and legal management of all these companies. You know, the administrative overhead is quite large, but I'm also improving our training. I spent a lot of my time actually training people. People ask me why you still doing training of scrum masters? Because, you don't have to do that, talking to the students who are really going to try to implement that. That is where the change is going to occur. So, usually at least two days a week. I am in training all day with people who are trying to learn scrum but what I'm trying to figure out is how to make that learning better. How to improve the training environment, how to improve, how to convey the subject matter in a better way. So, probably half my time is just focused on how to make that better, because for all the strong companies and for all the hundreds of trainers all over the world, they need constant improvement in their capability to communicate this. So half of my time is spent improving that content and writing about it, blogging about it, writing books about it and the other half of my time is spent on meeting with these trainers all over the world like I did last night, talking to you right now, when we get done here, I'm going to be on a podcast. So I have a huge amount of requests to talk about this kind of thing. And then at nights and weekends, I'm doing medical research because I think there's a big contribution that remains to be had there as scrum is made in the project management world. Okay, so if people want to be successful, you have to be not only focused, you need to be so passionate that you're willing to spend, there's a great book on, I forget the name of it, but how do people be great? And they have to in any domain, they need 10,000 hours of total focus in that domain and the book goes through people like, Well, how did Bill Gates become great at computing? He spent 10,000 hours studying writing code, fanatically focused on getting that expertise. So I would say to your students, You need to find out where you're going to put that 10,000 hours and it needs to be in a place that you get so fired up that in the middle of the night you wake up and you'll have to just do some work on and that's what I'm doing. I wake up in the middle of the night and I will have ideas, and I'm working for, people say, Jeff, how come I get email at three in the morning? Hey, for about an hour at three in the morning. That some of my best thinking time, right?

So one of the things we learned with scrum, though it is the most important thing is prioritization. So you have to decide what your goals are. And no matter what you're doing, okay, it's in school you have a bunch of classes, you have reports to be done. And to be effective, you really need to prioritize your activity. And in scrum, we put all of that on the wall and sticky notes, right? And we're using that wall to manage what we're doing. In that backlog of sticky notes, there will be the class that I need to go to, the homework that needs to be done. The reports I need to be create, the test I'm going to have to take. If all of that is prioritized clearly. So you're constantly going back and making sure you're doing things in the right order. You can get twice as much done in half the time. That's what my book is Scrum, The art of doing twice the work in half the time. So this is another message to your students. If you really want to be effective, if you really want to be successful, you need to learn to do twice the work in half the time. The only way you're going to do that is to really focus and prioritize. Then once you do that, then you need to understand the power of teams. Today you can't. There's very little you can do solo today. All major contributions are with teams of people working together. So how can you get a backlog and then a team to amplify your effect, okay. So just before we started talking, I was in the daily meeting of my team at Scrum Inc. We're talking about what we're doing yesterday, what we're doing today, what we're doing next week. What are the problems? Who needs help? Okay. So carefully prioritized twice the work in half the time, then working with a team, so you get a multiplicative effect. So if you could do twice the work in half the time personally, and then by working a team, you can multiply that again by two or three times.