What Famous Person Would You Want as Your Agile Mentor?
We recently asked our Agile Mentors community members, “What famous person would you want as your agile mentor?” We got everything from famous agilists to entrepreneurs, government officials and sports heroes. Here’s what a few of our members had to say:
Agile ‘Celebrities’
While almost everyone said that Mike Cohn is their favorite agile ‘celebrity’, a few other names made the list.
“He’s not a celebrity, but I’ve taken a couple of courses from Rob Payne at Lithespeed and would love to have him as a mentor. He has broad knowledge of how to successfully implement agile, Scrum and SAFe in corporate environments,” says a Scrum Master from Richmond, Virginia.
A Release Train Engineer from Charlotte, North Carolina added Simon Sinek to the list. “He’s incredible to listen to and his books are amazing!”
“I’ve pretty much ticked off this bucket list item—I was trained by the famous Mike Cohn and have been receiving his advise and asking him questions ever since,” according to a member from the United Kingdom, He adds, “I then sought further training by one of the UK’s leading agile figures, Geoff Watts. I feel truly blessed to have such names train and mentor me.”
Entrepreneurs
A Dallas, Texas-based agile coach added, “Mark Cuban—I feel he has a better grasp at prioritization, how to order things, how to set up your long game as well as your short game, and stay just enough involved to not be blamed when things go wrong.”
An agile coach from Southern California replied, “I like Mark Cuban a lot, for this reason …He believes that his ability to make himself more wealthy (which, let’s not kid ourselves, is at least one of his primary goals) is to make the lives of those who consume his products and services better. To me, Mark Cuban’s approach to ‘delight the customer’, has a tremendous amount of synergy with agile software development.”
Sports Stars
“I heard a story some time back that there was an Major League Baseball manager running Daily Scrum meetings with his team, in which they’d talk about what they’d done, what they plan to do, what impediments they have (within the scope of the game), and they retrospected as well. I’d love to spend some time with THAT guy—and his team,” says the California-based agile coach.
He adds, “Phil Jackson (National Basketball Association coach) would be fascinating because I find a lot of similarity between his coaching style and agile coaches. Jackson has always maintained that his time to coach is during practice, but during the game, other than lineup changes, he mostly doesn’t coach and prefers to let the players figure it out.”
A member from New Zealand says, “Wayne Smith who is a legendary All Black coach. He created an amazing culture in my local team over 20 years ago and his legacy still goes on. His nickname in rugby circles is ‘The Professor’—one of the smartest people to ever be involved in the game.”
A few other names that made the list:
- Peter Drucker
- Jane Goodall
- Richard Sheridan Dean Devlin
To join the conversation or to laugh along with us at all the things teams say (and a whole lot more), join the Agile Mentors Community. Visit