"We often tend to treat process like a mini-bureaucracy with dull and painful rules that cannot be broken. Tobias reminds us that it's the principles of scrum and not the rules that make it actually work. He comes at scrum from the angle of a case worker, navigating people through sometimes hostile systems and exploiting loopholes to obtain vital services. In this case, the vital service is simply a team's ability to enjoy the successful completion of relevant and fulfilling work. The People's Scrum wrests a good idea from the stultifying hands of certification and places it back where it belongs - in the hands of those who will actually use it. Isn't that was self-organization was really about?"

~ Jim Benson, Author of Personal Kanban and Winner of the Shingo Prize

"Tobias' essays remind us of why we were excited about "agile" in the first place, and what really matters. It doesn't matter whether you agree with everything you read here, it will make you think, and help you improve."

Lisa Crispin, co-author of Agile Testing

"Tobias Mayer has always brought both enthusiasm and skepticism to scrum. Whether you agree or disagree with him, and you're likely to do both, the essays in this book will always give you something worth thinking about."

Mike Cohn, author of Succeeding with Agile

"In this remarkable book, my friend Tobias Mayer shows that there is little--and perhaps no--distinction between being and doing. Simply put, Tobias recasts scrum as a way of being that is expressed in a variety of doings. Tobias's book has got me thinking--and if you let it, it will get you not only thinking but doing and being differently--and better."

Luke Hohmann, author of Innovation Games

"Tobias Mayer has a really interesting mind: wide, deep, imaginative, and quirky. I value the quirky most because it's unpredictable. But in hindsight his jumps reveal themselves as the result of intelligence and rigor. What's more, he gets those jumps gracefully down on paper so that we can all participate."

Lee Devin, co-author of Artrful Making and The Soul of Design

Tobias Mayer is known in the agile community as a brilliant and evangelical orator, an innovative trainer and an extraordinary trouble maker. You could call him the Hunter S. Thompson of the software arena, and no one who knows him would laugh. This book is a collection of essays drawn from his writing over the past seven years on the blogs Agile Thinking and Agile Anarchy, missives from the front lines of agile practice that represent the next generation of thinking on conventional agile topics like self-organization, technical debt and estimation-and utterly original writing on new topics like organizational anarchy, corporate oppression, the effect of testosterone on business practices, and artisanal product development.

Moving beyond the mere how-to, this is a book to excite the emotions and the intellect in those of us who have chosen the path of scrum to guide us in our work lives. Not since Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters has the discussion of software development been elevated to this level of world-view-changing discourse. In Tobias Mayer, technology has an exciting new voice to lead us into the brave new world of agile practice.