Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

In 2008 a completely avoidable financial crisis hit the world. Big banks spun prices out of control, leveraging themselves over and over again by taking on more bad debt than could ever be repaid. One of the countries hit hardest was Iceland. Privatized banks there had been spun off by the government and had taken huge risks in the financial markets. As they say on Wall Street, if you don’t know who the sucker in the room is, you’re the sucker. In this case, Iceland was the sucker. The amount of money they borrowed was staggering for such a small country. Eventually, the banks had valuations twelve times the size of the national budget. When it all came crashing down, the Icelandic “economic miracle” was in tatters.