When I wrote the first edition of this book, I promise I was thinking only about software development. However, as I gave talks on the subject afterwards, I found that business executives, actors, lawyers, journalists, and others were hearing their professions in the talk. It seems that quite a lot of fields involve people inventing and cooperating, and the outcomes in their fields are highly sensitive to the quality of their invention, communication, and collaboration. Most recently I was introduced to a company in Salt Lake City, O.C. Tanner, using the lean manufacturing approach in their manufacturing line for corporate rewards (plaques, pins, medals, and the like). I had thought that surely line-based manufacturing was quite far from the agile and cooperative game ideas, but it turns out that even (well-run) manufacturing lines are sensitive to the quality of ongoing invention, communication, and collaboration of their workers. In Chapter 5.1 on agile techniques, I will revisit the story of O.C. Tanner and Tomax, among other companies playing the cooperative game deliberately. Those of us using this vocabulary share the feeling that despite all the books written in the business world, there is still much to be learned from the cooperative game approach. |