 Oops. Hey. Good morning, everyone. We are here live at the Agile India Conference Webinar series. This is actually our second webinar, and it's a pleasure to have Jim McCarthy on the second series. Jim actually does not really need an introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction. Jim is kind of the pioneer behind the culture hacking work that he's been doing, very impressive stuff. I think at least in India, not many people are aware of his work. And we thought setting up this webinar and having a kind of a hangout with him to discuss some of the questions that people might potentially have to see what he's up to in terms of culture hacking and what he has to present at the conference which is coming up. So Jim, thanks for joining the call. Well, thanks for having me. This is quite a treat to be with my new friends and my new second home, India. I've always had a lot of passion and interest in India and wanted to spend more time there, so this is a great occasion for me. In fact, I came and I'm begging at your door, as I recall. I mean, I really want to come to India. That's why I'm coming. And your gracious willingness to be my host and to help me spread the ideas I have for people. That's great. I think maybe even more important the energy I have. You may not be familiar with my work, but you'll definitely be familiar with my energy because it lies behind and beneath all of this agile stuff is the energy I've been living and swimming in for many, many years. And it's only now that we've got a kind of a way we can ride and connect with each other and double and triple and quadruple the energy field that's happening in the world of design culture. In fact, your work predates a lot of the XP and the agile movement, and I think you've been doing research on culture hacking for about two decades now. So can you just briefly give us a quick tour or a walkthrough of what got you started and what you're up to these days with your culture hacking or culture design work that you've been doing? Sure, sure. Well, what got me started is what got everybody started, I guess, is trying to write software that actually works. And it's great, trying to do great software. It's a pretty difficult task. And I got pursuing that in 1976, 77, time frame right when the personal computer first came out and started appearing in cities throughout the country and little computer stores. And there were only 1,000 or 2,000 of us at that time programming personal computers. And that's when I checked in on the thing. And that's because the passion, the feeling, the sensation of being a computer programmer, the moment when you realize that I'm going to write your software to the rest of my life. This feels so good. This is so cool. That moment when you make that connection with the computer, that's what's been driving me ever since is that sensation, that feeling of at last I found some rational, predictable pal that will help me create a more rational world. So that's how I got started. Like everybody that was a hacker in those days, I just got started because we're sure love of the experience. And then I tried to figure out ways that I would make it pay for myself so I could do it full time like any other drug addiction. You become a drug dealer to keep the drugs flowing. So yeah, I had to start selling computers in order to buy them. And so I became a consultant and a custom programmer for people. And then I gradually found my way into the dawn of the commercial software era and got hooked up with a startup. And we produced the first object-oriented language in Windows called Actor. And I was the manager or the vice president of R&D at this company called Whitewater, which, as they say, was a critical success. It was not perhaps like a huge commercial success, but we did a lot of good things. We were suppliers to Borland of the Object Windows Library and the resource editors that got them started in the application framework and object-oriented technology. So we kind of caught that wave at Whitewater. And that was in the late 80s and early 90s. Well, prior to that time, I spent a decade at Bell Labs just kind of interning around genius people that were worth listening to, the guys that wrote the code. We all live by now and wrote Unix and C and C++. And those people in that world was a tremendous place for me to go hang out and be with and learn from and soak in their great software development environment. But the AT&T culture was a problem. I mean, I got to see that firsthand. As the world's largest company went, we had two million employees when I started and then it went all the way to zero. So that's important. The culture is, it was a vast enterprise, just totally failed to produce software, basically, to produce software. So anyway, so I got on this thing of object-oriented technology and also I got to where I was shipping on time and I found out that that was quite extraordinary. Nobody could ship on time and that was the fundamental problem and 80% of software projects failed altogether. And so I didn't know if I was any good at this or not. I mean, I had a small team of 15 people or 20 people in Whitewater and I went to software conferences and I gave a talk called Slipping Without Falling. And in that talk, first thing I did was just say, okay, here's my record. I've shipped these products with these people in this time. What is that better than or worse than what you guys are doing? And no one knew, right? I mean, I didn't know what the standard was, what the ideal situation would even be, but it turns out I had a pretty good record. And so I had the right to speak. And so I said, well, here's how I do it. And I started crafting these rules of thumb, many of which would bring familiar to the people here today because those rules of thumb kind of became the backbone. I mean, I probably should have been up. I ended up getting recruited by Microsoft and ran their C++ group for many key years where we came out with Visual C++ 1.0. We came out with all sorts of amazing things. I mean, it was amazing. It was a team unlike any other team. In fact, the team was so important to the people whose lives were changed by it that we just had our 20th reunion. And people came from all over the world just to be with that team again for just one more hour, one more day because it really did change everything for everybody because that's where we figured out how to ship software on time. That's where we figured out how to make it great on purpose. And when we figured out a lot of important things there and I ended up writing a book called Dynamics of Software Development which was 54 Rules of Thumb. If you wanna see some of that earlier work, this is where Agile came from. It came from this work, you know, and from the work of my predecessors, you know, but I gave people permission to actually just use their head and their heart and figure out the best way to do things. Prior to that time, it was this stuffy, I don't know what, this kind of, this really ugly culture, basically, you know, of people with ties and white shirts and mainframe computers. We're in a similar era now. Anyway, so if you wanna see that, don't look up 21 Rules of Thumb or something like that for shipping great products on time, it was a Microsoft essay that leaked. I wrote it for Neutral Proopses and it leaked, it got out. Everybody liked it. I also gave a talk on this that got pretty famous. In that event, Microsoft, the guy around the sea group, said that you could do it this way, right? And so that gave people permission to just relax and look at software in a different way and look at making it in a different way. In that way, later kind of became, in later iterations and with some additions became the Agile point of view or the extreme programming point of view or whatever. The various cultures, the microcultures that we're living in now. But once we decided to discover, my wife and I worked on that team with me, my wife worked with me, Michelle. And so we kind of felt like we had to figure out, we know how to ship on time. I mean, we went from a team of 200 people that took two years to ship a product that sucked to a much smaller team, 125 people, shipping anything we wanted and any time we wanted. We were shipping first guys to ever ship on subscription. We were the first guys to ever ship on CD-ROM. We were the first guys, in fact, there were no CD-ROMs. There was no optical media associated with computers. And so we were the first guys that took that, had the guys from Asia come in, the guys from Japan primarily, came over and we said we want to get CD-ROMs going as a storage medium for computers and we're going to give them to developers with our product. So, because there were no, we had the bootstrap to CD-ROM at the end of the day. Anyway, those were exciting and interesting times where a lot of innovation was coming and in the cultural activity associated with soccer. That's where we came up with the idea of a daily meeting. That's where we get, in fact, I find that a lot of this lean stuff comes from there too. That was the first, I think it was the first use of the word pivot with, that was one of my rules, pivot or take none. These rules kind of were, that gave a lot of people a lot of permission to experiment things. But what we decided to do was rather than just kind of push these rules, we wanted to figure out how you could design and implement a culture that would always produce greatness, that the culture would produce things. So, we went, Michelle and I started the laboratory where we put teams inside of the lab, give them a week to do something great. That a week to do something great. And then we recorded what they did that was successful and throughout what they did that was unsuccessful. We're one of the very few people, maybe like, I don't know, pretty much the only ones that actually just worked on this experimentally. In these teams, one after another, we call that boot camp where the first guys to use that name after the Marines are among the first, I think Dan, he's a cad, a VB boot camp. Anyway, we had this idea that you would come to this boot camp and you would transform your way of looking at the software and your way of looking at yourself and your way of looking at quality. The minimal bar has got to be greatness. I mean, that's the minimum. So, in that context of that laboratory and then taking that stuff out to various clients and working with them and just noting what worked and then replicating what worked, each team starting where the last team left off and solving the problem and the tension of greatness ended up in a long period of time producing software for your head. It's not surprising, but it should have been. Well, what's surprising? It's not surprising now, when I think about it, that the culture, the way you create a culture is actually with software, with algorithms that yield behavior that is exactly what you want for producing great products. So, we started that lab about 20 years ago and then we're on it still with pretty much the same techniques and assignments except that we have more solutions now. In other words, the old assignment was sort of do something great and good luck. And the new assignment is do something great and here's 150 pages on how others have done it. Jim, if I can- So, in a nutshell, that's what we're gonna do. Yes. Sorry, Jim. If I can interrupt for the benefit of the audience, I think you have a very good definition of what you mean by culture. So, I think you touched upon that, but it would be great if you can just define what you think a culture is and what compromises of a culture. How does it influence? That would help give people a context of what we're talking here. Okay, well, a culture, I forget my exact definition, but it's basically the things we believe together that are true and the values we hold, the principles we live by, the commitments we make and the procedures we follow. It might be a culture primarily, though, how you act. Like, whatever your motive, if you act good, you are good. You know, whatever your motive, whatever your intention, if your behavior is good, that's what we're after is how to capture that. And so, there's a certain amount of things you have to commit to in order to get those kind of results. For example, you have to value ideas that are scary. I mean, if you want ideas to come from, you know, we're trying to make software here which is intellectual property. In order to make intellectual property, you have to have intellectual discourse. You have to have intellects engaged. You have to create an environment where it's totally safe to say your scariest ideas. And you have to have an environment that is quite a bit more civilized than the contemporary environment in corporate settings. It's not very civilized. You have to have an environment that allows for humans to flourish and that requires healthy dealing with emotion and nurturing of shared vision, which is a state that we're always seeking. Shared vision is a state of being, not a set of words. It's a state of being, a state of multi-personal flow where the IQ is aggregate, where the ideas where you're living in an ecology of ideas, that the best ideas are always acted upon, that you have radically democratic team processes, the system that we work with. It's always the team has to have unanimity before actually 100% agreement before they do anything. I don't know if I got to the exact definition of culture there for you, but it's culture is something you can make up. That's the most important thing to get. At this stage of the game, at this stage of our dialogue together, you must understand that culture is something that you can design. You can make a beautiful culture on purpose. Agile, extreme programming, Kaiser and Kanban, all these things, these are kind of proto, they're like, they're not there yet. They're not full blown cultures. They can, in general, they don't even have means of adopting themselves and stuff like that. But they are steps on the road to full blown culture design. And that's when I'm coming to India to talk about. It's not what's happening now, but if you like what's happening now, you're gonna love what's happened next. That feeling of agility and stuff, that could be produced by a culture design that mandates greatness. In fact, it's an argument that must be turned to. That greatness is your goal. And greatness is the goal for mature adults, really. Now the other thing to keep in mind is kind of the Martian culture. So let me get a little historical context. What we're doing today is the climax of at least in the Western parts of the world, the, what's called the Enlightenment, which was something that took place late 1600s, early 1700s, where science was born, where reason became valued, and where freedom became a political idea and where the separation of religion from beliefs, that there are other alternative beliefs as well as religious beliefs, other kinds of beliefs are possible. All that happened in the Enlightenment. And basically, since then, until we discovered software, I mean software is the full fruit of that era of awakening to scientific reality. The full fruit of that is software. And the interesting thing about software is that it creates culture. It creates culture. Like, you can't make great software without a great culture. And so, and that explains the mediocrity of the general software case. But software creates, demands its own culture and it's one of the few times in all of history where greed and good are totally aligned. Like, you can't make a lot of money with mediocre software. So you start to try and create a great team and you find that the only way you do that is by things like freedom, full free expression of emotion, radical commitment to freedom of democracy, democracy in our every action, radical democracy, and the aggregation of the mass of humanity on the team into a single thinking, feeling, believing, envisioning entity. That's what we're trying to create. That's the culture that I know how to inseminate, how to start, catalyze. And that is the fulfillment of the destiny of the scientific revolution. That is Isaac Newton's gold out of mud, right? That's when he hits it. It's in that fulfillment. And that's how science got started, right? A bunch of guys trying to create gold on lead. That was it, that was what, you know, well, isn't that really what software is to? Creating the promise is fulfilled in software. In fact, like here I am talking to new friends from India. And you know what? I'm more in the same culture with you than I am in my neighbors who are pre-software people, right? We're in the same culture. It's a culture of software hacking and software development that's global. Everywhere I go in the world and I'm gone everywhere, it feels like sometimes. Everywhere I go in the world, I find the people that are my fellow citizens in the software nation, right? It's an English speaking, fortunately for a guy like me. It's an English speaking thing. In fact, I was talking to a friend from Japan. He said that their company has spent the last couple of years just moving entirely to English. You know, because of this phenomenon. Now, English isn't any superior, I think, but it seems to be the languages that we're trying to globalize on. And like I say, fortunately for guys like me, I can be understood anywhere in the world if as long as I'm talking to people on the software. Because now it's not just picking up the language, right? It's picking up this new culture. It's very easy to see a post-national, I promised everybody a long review tonight and a little message about it coming. It's a long review. Picture a post-national entity made up of citizens of the software nation, right? That we may also be citizens of other countries and localities, but something that transcends time and space is this cultural pulse that's driving all of us. The people that will come to your conference, I suspect they're coming because of this cultural beckoning, this feeling, this sensation, this idealism that we share toward, no, we're gonna make something good and great. And this is how, this is the people that are gonna do it. This is the people that are called to that work. So, though you may not know my name, that's what I've been working on, brothers and sisters, along with all of you, and you'll recognize the feeling and the hopes. And the destiny that I'm seeing. That's great, Jim. I think you've given a very energetic definition of what energy is and how all of us, being global citizens in some sense, are kind of bonded with each other. Why are this culture that we share of being in the hackery of creating great software that actually changes the world? So that's fantastic. Well, the highest value in my world is effectiveness. And I don't have any trouble selling that value to anyone. Everybody wants their time to matter. Everybody wants their behavior to produce the intended result. That's what effectiveness is. I wanted to do this and I figured out how to do it with the least cost and the most payoff. Effectiveness. If you pursue effectiveness until you are exhausted and spent, you'll end up pursuing virtue and other good things. So this pursuit of effectiveness is universal and that's why we're bothering. That's why people like you trouble to learn English, right? Because you want to get in the language of this programming, the language of effective computer code. Look, the computer and all of the internet is just a premonition for the society we're building. The connected, effective society, right? Like code that doesn't work, it goes away in the computer world, right? There it doesn't get shipped at all. I hope. You know, like we're building, every act of building software we take is an act of tremendous idealism and belief in the rational order of things. That if I count on the internet, if I use the protocols inside the internet, they'll just return the result. That they're robust, that they cannot be taken down and moreover, they cannot really be hidden from others. We do have nations that are fooling around with that idea and stuff but that's all of them collapse. I mean, that won't work. They're gonna have to get too greedy, right? Look, I mean, we're talking serious money to be made in the goodness of software. Apple made a great product while back, the phone, right? The iPhone. Apple made that one product, maybe it's one or two others that are pretty great, the iPod, and they're gonna have greater season control, the music business, stuff like that. All that stuff was like pretty big. Two or three great things, maybe. And with two or three great things, a few months ago, a few quarters back, they had more cash on hand than the United States government. More cash than the guys that can print it. They had more money than the United States government. One company, one or two great problems. So, you know, that should tell the tale of whether it pays or not to have great design and great teams and great software. And I use the word software a little bit loosely. I mean, the whole mess, you know, the whole thing, you know, websites, that's software, right? These all these devices, these little phones, those are basically software, right? You know, the program of their, you know, their personal computers in your pocket and their programmable devices filled with software. That's why we like them. We like the software. We like the fact that they change along with us, that they grow to understand our needs, that they're all fed. But the thing is, it's really hard to make that team that makes great software. It's really hard to create an innovative idea. Everybody says they want to be an innovator, right? I mean, yeah, really? Let's see that. Because the first thing that happened to innovators is people try to kill them. They throw rocks at them. They don't want change. They don't want, you know? Steve Jobs, when he did the Mac, he had the threat and the pay for the greatest ad in television history, which was the big brother ad where they threw the, people probably don't remember, but there's a big ad when the Mac was done. And it was so controversial in Apple that he was even the CEO down there or whatever. He couldn't get it done and he had the threat and to pay for it personally. Right, that's what innovators get. They get hung on responsibility and everything else. So if you're innovating and everybody's going, oh, great, great, great, you aren't innovating enough because they should be upset because you're breaking thrown over all the rules they know and love and everything. And if you're not suffering the pains of innovation, then what you're doing is just a tweak. Jim, can we take a quick question from the participant? There is Will, who is actually, I know Will, he's from California. He's watching this live and he has a question which is kind of apt at this moment. If you don't mind, I'll just pop that in here. Go for it. So Will basically is asking what in your estimate is the degree of adoption in the enterprise culture today? The way you define culture, where to what degree is the way you envision culture or the era of magnificence actually adopted today in the enterprises? Does, I'm not sure I understand what you said. I missed a couple words. So something about, can the kind of culture describing relate, how does it relate to enterprises? Bigger enterprises, is that the implication or the question you think? The way you envision the culture to be in a company, currently you want it to be at X, but I believe that it is at X delta, which is less than X. So what is the degree of adoption in your research and what would be an estimate and when we would actually hit the point X? What is the degree of adoption that's possible or what is the degree of adoption today? What's the degree of adoption today, I believe? The degree of adoption today is pretty damn low. I would say, I mean, you know, like there's a lot of things you have to overcome to live right. And one of them, you know, but on the other hand, you know, the entire world is pursuing this idea of startups and startup energy and startup cultures and startups and Duane startups and you know, there's all this hu-ha about startups and many, many parts of the world are looking to that as the solution to most of their ills that they'll start new enterprises that will be great. And really what they're saying is that, I mean, I know everybody in Silicon Valley or Seattle where I would, you know, they're all pursuing this idea of four people in a garage, boy, that's when it's good. Well, what they're really talking about is like four people who love each other. So when you love each other, you can be said to be in a righteous culture, you know, because it's only when you love each other that you can tickle each other into great achievement, right? If your parents loved you and expected great things from you, you're likely to be trying to get great things regardless of what Abel says. Most of us did not have that good fortune and so we have to love each other. We have to get a coach that loves us and someone that just goes, when you go, but what about this crazy idea of not go for it, go for it, do it, fail, succeed, win, be, you know. That's what parents are supposed to say to babies, you know. So, but in corporations, big corporations, all the best I can say is they seem to be turning to the problem. They seem to be looking at culture as a strategic thing. I've noticed that the last 20 years, maybe 10 years, especially they've all pitched about their culture. So that's something, right? They're starting to complain about it, but I never have seen anybody go, oh, well, I know how to design a culture. That's what I'm saying. I do know how to design a culture. I don't have enough experience at it. I have more experience than anybody I know, but, you know, it's very early and when I'm talking about innovators getting rocks thrown at them, I feel in that crowd, you know, luckily and unluckily, you know, because you have to change everything to get a great culture, really. Like to try and do a scrum meeting without having a team that votes unanimously, that's stupid. To try and do, you know, some agile pair programming without living in an ecology of ideas where feelings are promoted. The act of feeling is promoted. That's stupid, right? You have to do some things that make those things flourish and those things that you have to do, those are great and those are gonna make a hero out of you. They're gonna make you grow up and there's nothing stopping any team in any company from adopting a great culture. Nothing, right? Like the beauty of the system is that for all its flaws, once you adopt a great culture, you're the most powerful thing in the company. So you're kind of hard to fire. The other thing is that immunity or that results, if you have a great big software hit and you did it in a radical way, you're not gonna get fired. Results confer immunity, right? So you can be a revolutionary as long as you're paying your way in most companies. Like, you know, we did a bunch of revolutionary things in our group with Microsoft in the 1990s and including we had the world's first coach, we had, you know, all sorts of things. Like to hire someone who's job was to talk to the team about the team and their life together and their personal need to express and reach. You know, that was just crazy in those days. That was the kind of innovation that got rocks thrown in it. And it got right, it took Microsoft four or five years to catch up to what I was up to and what we were up to in our group. And then they got scared. Nonetheless, you know, they tried to promote it as a culture for sale for many years and that's what was going on. Microsoft, Microsoft Solutions Framework, they called it. But it was just these ideas. And then it became Agile. I mean, the Agile guy did a great job of finding a way to bundle this energy. However, you have to be very explicit about what you're doing. You're not adopting Agile, you're designing culture. Right, so you gotta have the seeds of a culture to build on a kernel and that's our product. We give it away. I mean, it's called the core protocols and that will catalyze the development culture if it properly. But, you know, in terms of a step to moving, you can move in that direction and then you can make apps on top of that. It's like an operating system software but it's just software from your head. You know, I said earlier that the road we're on is the software creates culture and this is the beginning of that kind. This is one instance of that. And if you got a particular corporation and you want to talk about how to, we call it booting, how to boot that corporation. Well, you start with booting yourself and then you boot, you know, a couple of three people make a team and live great. And watch what happens, you know. Things don't have to happen. You don't have to get too evangelical. You don't have to get too much of you ought to do this, you know, like that's kind of a weak claim. You ought to do this. You ought to do what I do. Or you ought to do, you ought to do agile. Or you ought to do per program. You ought to do, you know, any particular idea. It's not really about that. It's like I do this and get these results. That's all. That's all you have to do. And I'm happy to talk to anybody, anywhere in the world that wants to try this personally. That's why I'm trying it personally. The problem is not the other guys on the team. The problem is not the company you're working in. The problem, my friends, is you and me. And what we're doing is culture design, okay? Next conference or two conferences now, I want you to have a culture design conference. I don't want you to be so big at it as one little thing early on in the revolution. Don't get married to that brand. Let's become designers of great culture and learn how to do that. We don't have much of a clue really. I say, I know how to do it. It's the only reason I can say that is I know more than anyone else, I think. At least I know more than anyone I've met out of design and culture. But man, there's a lot we haven't learned. And I know I'm conducting an event there with you guys so that we could spend a day with people who are serious about this kind of work. So come to that event if you're serious about becoming a great architect of human life, a great culture designer, because that's what we're working on. And yes, there's all kind of processes we could do and all kind of things. But really, what would yield a great culture if done repeatedly, repeatedly? That our goal is always better to repeatedly get a team to a state of service, any team anywhere if they just do these things. And through the power of software ideas, that's possible. But that's just the beginning. I love the way you have set up the special event that you have, which is the one day workshop on culture design. The interesting thing I find is that you need to apply and you need to qualify to be present at that event because it goes back to what you were saying. I mean, you need to get a group of really like-minded people, high energy people in the room and then magic happens. I'm not trying to sell a course to someone. I'm trying to offer a relationship to people who want to pursue this particular dream. And if you're not willing to tell me who you are before we can say, yes, let's be friends, then I'm not willing to be friends with you. I mean, that's what we're offering, right? It's fair to offer a friendship, connection, love and success and creating a new field that humanity is just starving for, just dying for. And the energy that's attracting people all over the world in these little houses, that's the big energy. The energy of human need that we could solve, that we can solve and will solve, it's just a matter. It's kind of all over about the shouting because we're living at the climatic age of the age of reason and how fortunate we are that we can even be having this conversation and that I can be virtually everywhere right now. I mean, that's part of the miracles that we're creating even before we're really very good at it. Cool. One thing you briefly mentioned at the beginning of your talk was this notion of trying to experiment and trying to try out things and be willing to create the safe environment in which it was okay to fail and learn. And I kind of heard a similar thing from another person, Dave Snowden, who's been very influential in the way I think about the world around me. So Dave Snowden has this term that he uses called safe fail experimentation, which basically is about you need to actively create these environments in which it is okay to fail and these are safe fail experiments which means it's safe to fail. The primary reason being we wanna learn and move on, we wanna learn and improve from there. And I think you also seem to touch upon similar thoughts. So what's your take on safe fail experimentation? Well, it's just kind of fine when people come up to me, like we have these set of protocols that are personal protocols that you use to kind of accomplish basic civilized behavior, basic civilized behavior. And everybody's got an idea to make them better. And that's a part of our kind of runaway democracies. Like, oh, everybody's better, you know? Like this stuff that we're working on is like come out of blood, sweat, and tears. It isn't ideas we have, you know what I mean? This is practices that work among hundreds if not thousands of people experimenting with it. People that are earnestly trying to get a team to a state of incredible flow and then make a great product, all within a week. And they may or may not even know each other when they began. They may hate each other when they begin, right? So there's lots of things here we have to overcome. But when it works again and again and again and we prevented all the downsides, you know? Like, that's the result of experimentation. I mean, we're living in a scientific era. I'm not, you know, there's a lot of new age values and stuff that are emerging at the same time. But I'm not sure that they amount to great practices, you know? So you want to practice till something works and then you want to absorb and try and learn everything that works, then, you know, start creating your own stuff, right? I mean, we have to establish like, no, this far, we're this far, you know? And then we've got to know people agreeing that we're that far, that we have a bit of a conspiracy of virtue. Like, here's how far we are. This will give us these good results. And here's what we all need to do and the community begins to form what's missing, what can go on top. So we've got what we think is a good candidate for a common platform, no more nor less. But you have to do things. Like, you have to have a mechanism for making decisions with many people. And that mechanism is based on anonymity, which is both the most efficient and definitely the most effective. When you smoke your conflicts out, before you start acting, you don't want to, if you act with ambivalence, you might as well just cut a foot off or something. I mean, you're not gonna move correctly if you're acting. So you get everybody agreed and you act. Now, the other thing is like, right now it's virtually illegal to have a feeling of work. The only feeling you can have is unhappy. And most of us aren't happy much of the time, really, as a percentage. So, sad is not allowed. Like, it's illegal to cry at work. It's illegal to be afraid that work. And it's illegal to be mad at work. And so that's pretty much huge percentage of human consciousness and human life devoted to those four, three primitives. So, you know, any system that doesn't have a way of dealing with those feelings is just not worth talking about. So, you know, we have a few things that address those feelings. Not the other, yeah, yeah, but criticism, right? That's the only one. You gotta make your ideas improved. You gotta live in an ecology of ideas. So if you're dealing properly with feelings and stuff and get ideas stated, that's a start. But then, you gotta improve on it by common working on the same idea. And so, criticism doesn't, or the way we criticize really sucks. So, any system that doesn't allow for the equalest improvement of ideas for the management of human emotion and for the development of a decisive, efficient decisiveness among a group. It isn't really worth considering. And that's some of the results of experience, you know? That's what we saw in our work, was that great teams shared those characteristics. And let's see, what else? Other fundamentals that you have to have. Conflict resolution, you know, when you start fighting, you gotta have at least a couple of tools that help you just get through that. 90% of conflict is just listening, can be resolved by listening. If I listen to you, and then you listen to me, we're gonna stop fighting, about 90% of that. Just by listening. Yeah, so let's see, what else? You gotta have an intention, you gotta form an intention. And so, when you behave a goof, you gotta have error correction, any consistent as error handling, right? So, this is just like that problem. The design of a culture must have robust error handling, and general error handling. So, you check people's intention. What is your intention? That's an intention check. What behavior are you looking for with as a result of your being? Or what, or what? That's a right everybody has in the course of the year. And you gotta have freedom of spatial engagement. Like, no one has to be anywhere, at any time. It's up to them where they are, right? So, there has to be quite a bit of freedom and trust that people that need to be, and that they're the best judges of what's most important. Then you have to know, you have to have some sort of system for facilitating the continuous and deep group awareness of what the members of the group want. Like, what you want, right? We have a commitment that's like, you gotta know and disclose what you feel, what you think, and what you want. That's all, you don't have to disclose anything else. In fact, it's better if you don't. But, if you will tell us what you want in the minute, in the week, in the life, in the product, whatever, what you want is very important to all of us, because it's only by the aggregate state of wants that are known can we be successful, because success is fulfilling wants. So, those are just some of the primitive things that have, I say primitive, I mean small, right? Those are low level, fundamental things that must be provided for in any culture. And, most of the culture stuff that's happening is sort of proto-culture and pre-culture. It's all kind of branded, money-making. It's trying to cash in a little early, it seems to me. But, you know, we got to fund as you go, I understand it. But, the big fruit is like more general living solutions. I get complaints out of people that are in my teams that go like this, so I'm really freaking out because I love the people at my job and I'm loved by them more effectively than I am by the people at my home. That's what you want. I mean, you want that to be the bar, right? The solution, of course, is you invite the people from home to come to work. And then that's a whole other bunch of solutions which I almost can't even get into now, but if you come spend a day with me, we'll talk about it because the solution to most work problems are the people that we exclude from work including our own children. I mean, I've seen it happen in the tests, you know. I've seen it happen in the boot camp where the kids come and solve all the problems, where the spouse comes and solves all the problems. You have to stop being afraid to let people be there with you. You have to be an innovator. I mean, if you're not wanting to be courageous, I don't know what I can do for you. I can help you be courageous. But you can't skip it. Courage is doing, to me, courage is wise choices while feeling fear. The fear you're always gonna have but are you gonna choose wisely while you're afraid? That's the question. So that's what courage is. It's a history and a track of it, of choosing correctly, of choosing wisely, considering everything even though you're afraid. So if you live in an environment that's healthy like this and a culture that's healthy like this, boom, you start to grow. And when you start to grow, doing software is not so hard. You can grow into it. You can do less, do it better. I mean, all sorts of things happen. All sorts of things happen when we gain proof. It was the proof of that. But until then, everything's gonna hang up. So Jim, if I can summarize, sorry, go ahead. No, can you go ahead? Yeah, I was about to say if I can summarize, I think I read one of your blogs or one of your writings, I think, where you talk about what are the five features of a great culture. And I think I would just like to summarize them real quick because you touched on a little bit. If you got them in front of you, say them, will you? Yeah, I'll go ahead. So the first feature I think is to be, can be counted upon. So you can be counted upon. Other people can count upon you. Which basically is extend personal freedom in all things. Then the second thing you talk about is the emotional, creativity, safety that people can have in this environment. The whole radical democracy that you talked about, where everyone has opinions and are free to express them. The other thing you talked about is the nobility of purpose, having nobility in the purpose that you're trying to do, believing that everyone is in pursuit of greatness. And then experience the ever greater effectiveness even in both personal and group interactions. So I think those were kind of briefly the five things, the five features of a great culture that I think you touched upon. Is that fair summary? It's not too bad, like it's well said by you. And I know that those are ideas I stated as key. I think it'll stick out, it'll last for a while, looking at those five things because those are areas we're really challenged on. I mean, the thing is we have to commit to living better. Hello, does anybody still hear me? I just turned off the video for a second. We are here. Go ahead, Jim. Oh, okay. Okay, am I back? Okay, yeah. So, you know, we have to learn to live better. We have to be better to ourselves, better to our kids, better to our fellow workers. We've got to be more effective. Alan, do you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, because my video, it doesn't look good. Am I still on video? Yes, yes. It's looking weird here, but that's okay. It's always looking weird here from my point of view. That's life with me. Yeah, okay, so, something's weird. We can hear you and we can hear you and see you, Jim. Okay, you can hear me and see me and then that's the point, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right, so like if you want great soccer where you have to become a greater person, you can't cheat, you can't get great software out of mediocre people. You can't get great software out of a crummy team. You can't, it's never going to happen. Your products are never going to be better than you. The bug count is a constant and it comes from the defects and the relationships among the people. If you want to reduce the bug count, for example, as an example of quality, must have the QA people work on the relationships of the people and the quality of their interactions. That's where bugs come from, you know, and that's also where greatness comes from. If you get into a shared vision state, you don't let mediocrity creep in. You just look at each other and you totally know that no, that's a bad idea because you're in this state of shared vision with someone else. It's like a glance between two lovers is the greatest of all data compression schemes. You just glance and you see and you know what you're just more of one. So, you know, like you're going to have to do some block and tackle work, you're going to have to get in touch with your feelings, share them with other people, this is difficult for men. By the way, you're going to have to let the women enter, God's sake. You know, like this discrimination against women must end and it must end now. It's ridiculous. There are greatest resources and assets that we're marginalizing and it does break my heart. When I go to these various parts of the world and I see all the guys are stepping into this lively, beautiful, rich culture, but they're marginalizing their own women like we do in the West and don't. It's just really bad. It's really bad. Michelle and I really won't even take on a team if it doesn't have enough women anymore because they just don't work. They won't lift off properly. And that's true of every ethnicity as well. The more ethnicity you have, the happier you'll be. And that's why I say goodness and greed coalesce. We don't have to do stuff because someone says it would be good if we did it differently. We do it because we're greedy for effectiveness. Enjoy, we want joy. If you want joy, let the women come in and take care of things. For God's sake, it's a mess. Really, I can't overstate that because that is our great sin right now. We have to create women that are, we have to create women that are interested in science. We have to create them opportunities. We have to be inventive. We have to invite them and welcome them. And you can't get it by saying you can't cry at work. You have to be men that are attracted to women. Not exclusively. So I just noticed we have about three minutes left and there was one question here which I think is pretty good to kind of at least summarize the discussion and give pointers to people, post this webinar in terms of where they can go to learn more stuff. So one of the questions is all of this has been very interesting. And for those of us who cannot attend the Agile India workshop, are there pointers that you can give where we can learn more about code protocols, more about software for your head? Those are the topics that you mentioned. And what kind of pointers you would give people to go from here after this webinar? Yeah, well, let's see. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to get into it. And it's kind of like when I was trying to get into the computer revolution, when there are only a few of us, you have to just want to, number one, and then dig around. We probably don't make it as easy as we ought to be. But one good thing to do is join us on Facebook. We have a pretty active Facebook group where people are experimenting with and living with these protocols in that group. Because it's hard to go boot a team, but you might be able to just boot yourself and then join us there and practice your new way of being using the protocols in a group. In that group, let's see. If you go to Facebook, I think it's Facebook, Welcome to the Booted. Let me just try it real quickly. Facebook, yeah, you can go to Facebook. There's a page where it says how to join the Booted. And it's Facebook, Welcome to the Booted. You can also just go directly to the group, the Booted. It's called the Booted. And that's Facebook.com slash groups slash the Booted. Or I can give you our group number as well. But if you're at all interested in this stuff, you've got to get with the people that are doing it and get right next to them and enjoy being with them and challenge yourself and challenge them. There's another group too where we discuss it. Like we have one group called the Booted where we try to practice it. We have another group where we discuss it called Facebook.com groups, MediCorps, MediCorps, M-E-T-A-C-O-R-E. Also, we have 100 podcasts from showing our good podcasters. And everybody seems to really enjoy those podcasts. So we're re-upping our commitment to that. That's at McCarthyShow.com. There's a website called liveingreatness.com. And that's where the protocols are kind of kept and disseminated. So you can always go there to a single protocol by knowing how to formulation for typing the URL. But we'd like to know you. I mean, we're at that level right now. And so if you're at all thinking about going to Agilindia, definitely go and definitely take the extra time to spend with us. You can get it free to our thing or you get a scholarship. If you need one, we'd prefer to be financially supported just because everything costs money. But our code and all of our stuff is free. And it's licensed in a way that will spread freedom because it uses the new license to win on its way into every situation. All right. Thanks a lot, Jim. What I'll do is after this podcast, after this webinar is over, the links that you mentioned, I'll add them to the page where this webinar was hosted. So anyone else coming along can actually get access to the links you mentioned. So people would be able to access that. I'm afraid we are running out of time. It's already about an hour since we started. I think it was just illuminating. I mean, it's fantastic hearing you talk. The energy is very vibrant. And I can feel the passion you have for this topic. And it would be, I'm just counting the days to see you in Bangalore for the conference. Well, great. I sure hope to make some new friends. That's why I'm coming. All right, great. Anyone else? Thanks a lot for attending. All you attendees who attended, thank you so much. And the people from the conference, thanks a lot. And this is going to be great. So don't miss it for heaven's sake. I mean, you're just like, that's just idiocy. Don't miss this opportunity. Thank you, Jim. OK, bye-bye. Bye. All right, thanks, Jim. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you all. Bye.