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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-07-07
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4thQcgLCqk
hello I'm here to talk about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness a great American dream that's often not fulfilled in the words of the poet Robert Burns the best laid plans of mice and men often go terribly wrong and lead to pain and suffering stead of the promised hope I first started to wrestle with this problem as a cadet at west point we went through
a lot of pain and suffering in our training and in the last year I was there they need me the training officer for company L. to because they had a marching problem on the parade field company L. two was known as the loose dukes because for a hundred years they had a tradition of mediocrity sloppy performance for decades people that tried to get them to March
longer train harder but nothing worked so I knew I had to do something different so what I decided to do is I couldn't tell them what to do but I could put up on the bulletin board at night and color coded notes exactly how their performance was in the parade field and exactly what they needed to do to improve you know Charlie has got to stop
sticking his sword in the ground in the middle of the parade the third platoon has got to turn the corner in synchronization and that commander has to a not cheat his commands crisply it exactly right timing to everyone's amazement they became the number one company of the corps cadets within three months and general macarthur died at this time and he it specified there must be a
company cadets marching behind his casket to lay him to rest and L. two was chosen so for now dead last to putting out one of our greatest generals of the grave was a long journey in a very short period of time now I graduated from west point and I went into the airforce %HESITATION well was a west point I learned something from other leaders I lived
in a room which where they had a plaque on the mantelpiece it said general Dwight D. Eisenhower slept here and every time I'd read that plaque I'd remember his famous quote plans are worthless but planning is everything so when I got to be a fighter pilot I wasn't reconnaissance we did a lot of planning but one day one of my fellow pilots and at a brewery
was blown out of the air over Hanoi by a Sam missile and I said to myself he did really good planning but he was flying straight level over the target that could get me killed from that day forward my plan was to have a vision with the target was and as soon as I crossed North Vietnam I went into an evasive maneuver because every second I
knew I was being fired at in only at the last moment would I come up straight level offer a target just for a second snap that photo no I got out of there alive over half the people I flew with did not come back from their missions and when I came back to the United States it was a big surprise I come so close to getting
killed so many times it felt like it was a new life every day was like a bonus day a free day and what was I going to do with that so I asked the airforce to send me back to the airforce academy become a train to be a professor part back to school at Stanford trained to be a professor at the airforce academy and from there
I went into that universal caller on medical school I was on the faculty there for eleven years while I was there I got my expertise was building super computer models of the human cell and showing how it evolved in multiplied and what caused it become cancerous what what could make that stop how do we cure cancer and while I was there big banking company running a
hundred fifty banks all over North America came by and they said you know at the university you have the best expertise it technologies we use at the back you have all the knowledge and know that none of the money but at the bank we've got all the money and we don't know what we're doing you should come work for the bank and it would be a
perfect marriage of knowledge and money and they made me an offer that my wife couldn't refuse poor university professor so I wind up at the bank and what do I see I see they're running all these huge projects hundreds of developers and they manage all these projects with again char and this is a technology that was introduced to the military of the United States in nineteen
ten it didn't work very well in World War one it it didn't work very well that because every piece of the project is lined up with the date and if anybody misses that timing the whole project is to lead and what it gets delayed the customers get upset that managers get angry that would force these developers to work nights weekends they go one death marches it
reminded me of the Romanian galley it you know the slaves at Rockwell rowing the witness cracking but as a fighter pilot I do the essence of the problem these guys could not land a project you know we learned as a fighter pilot that we had it very carefully bands that are played right on the end of the runway and if we did it we might go
halfway down the runway and slide off the runway into the trees and that's what they were doing every project sliding off the runway into the tree so I went to the seal and I said this bank is totally screwed up if you give me the worst business you in the back I will fix it just like I fix company L. to and he said so the
line if you want that headache you've gotta so I said okay I will report to you once a month do you the senior management and the rest of the time you stay out of my unit we're gonna run this is a little company in a company like a start up and so we broke them down into small team sales marketing installs engineering everyone all working together
with team incentives in a collaborative space and we ran weekly cycles we began building a backlog of what we what we needed to do and I began to show them how to live here plan how is it that a pilot can make it perfect touchdown he has to look at altitude airspeed rate of descent the heading of the airplane understand the wind of the weather and
every few seconds speak adjusting constantly so every week they would try to land the airplane at the end of the runway bank and a week after week they did it and surprise surprise in less than six months that team was the best team in the back they've gone from the worse money losing unit to the most profitable use in the bank because they made their work
visible the team was given the responsibility to fix the problem and they self organized to make it happen it's all about learning how to land the airplane now for that banking experience I was asked by a series of companies to come in and deal with tough problems so I I needed to figure out how to do this consistently and get other people to do it other
than me I couldn't be there all the time for everyone and so I began to think about how would I do this I was running a little French company in Cambridge Massachusetts on the I I the MIT campus and five graduate students for MIT came by and they said we're right starting up a company building robots can you read a subspace and I said sure we
have a couple extra rooms you could use for a lab and they were building these insect like robots and every other day the robots would come wandering into my office they were trying to hunt me down with heat seeking sensors and a senior professor at MIT was a copout if he would come by on Fridays and he would see how they were doing and I asked
him I said professor works harder these robots work you said you have the first that you understand the need to understand is that for thirty years we tried to build a smart system at MIT and it's been a total failure we tried to build this command and control system with really big computers huge databases and it didn't work it the best I could do was a
smart choice program so we said I watched insects and I wanted to create something that had distributed Telligent a chip in the leg that can move a leg a chip in the spine that can coordinate legs a neural network in the head that figures out where to go and he turned a lot of the legs flapped in it what little to its speed was like a
baby learning how to walk and three minutes was running around the room I said wow that's amazing I used to have these really slow developers maybe we can give them some simple rules and they would learn how to boot up into a super intelligent team do you think that work and he said why don't you try it well I did a short time later a company
a very successful company hardly and to build a new product it was gonna replace all oral products and half the time they've ever done it before and I had to figure it out in our product it'd be used by really big companies and I had to tell them how to use the product in a natural way and we start with study the literature and we found
best paper in the Harvard Business Review we're not Kentucky itchy to Japanese professor said showing three different styles of leadership number one again chart you know what happens with that one number two a transitional strategy at Fuji Xerox and number three that what they saw and the best manufacturing plants in the world so we ran how to implement number three and talking should not have said
it needs to be self organizing self motivated teams management is to let go and stepped back they need to get out of the way so the teams can figure out what to do so we implemented that in nineteen ninety three by nineteen ninety five I got together with my partner catch Ueber we started rolling it out to industry in two thousand and one we wrote the
agile manifesto and since then it's gone everywhere in the world all the major software companies they're building fighters agriculture machinery space probes Joe justice in the picture there is showing a car company how to build a car in one week cycles a new car every week but the leading edge of sites of this agile movement today it's actually in the schools the US and Europe I
recently visited a school in the Netherlands where the kids have been trained a self learn the bell would ring they come running into the room teams of four they would run to the wall put up there some boards on the wall they have a short daily meeting what it would do yesterday what we do today what are the problems that are getting in the way run
to the desk and start to work the teachers just standing there saying nothing they only talk when they're asked for help the enthusiasm of these kids was so overwhelming I'm standing there with other teachers were crying the kids say it's faster learning better grades they finish weeks early they have more fun that's a definition of fun for everything they do they make sure the handicapped children
are involved naturally in the workings of the teams as team members the motivation problems go away the disciplinary problems go away the team executes self discipline if they need a little help from the teacher they might ask for it but generally they don't need it so this is the future of learning and if you go back into the world that most of us live in we're
not operating that way the surveys show that most people think work really sucks the only thing worse at work is being sick in bed I recently asked software developer for working at BMW software in Paris how we like to swim team he started choking up we started bursting into tears he said I can't tell you the exhilaration I feel it's changed my life everyone of you
could experience that you could grab back your power Brownback your freedom gain a life that's transcended and the exhilaration you would feel would give you a happiness that you would remember till your grave that's what I wish for every person in this room and you to give up and let go to make it happen thank you very much
