John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton The Founding Fathers of Agile

Introduction Nothing has ever been invented — not the light bulb, not the automobile, not the iPhone. Someone at some point got the notion to combine two or more existing ideas and call it the next new thing. So it was with the Agile Alliance, the Agile Manifesto and its nine principles. In February 2001, 17 “anarchists” met to create a common and more efficient method of software development. They determined what was valuable, productive, essential, negotiable, deliverable, trustworthy, sustainable, creative and simple. [1] Eight of the “anarchists” then posed for that famous brown tinted faded photo as though they had just drafted the Declaration of Independence. But as with all inventions, their work was based on the ideas of at least two famous individuals at least a century or two earlier. In the summer of 1855, 16-year-old John D. Rockefeller, the itinerant son of a snake oil salesman, unable to afford a formal college education, completed a three-month course of study at E. G. Folsom’s Commercial College, a chain trade school with branches in seven cities. He acquired working knowledge in double-entry bookkeeping, penmanship, and the essentials of banking, exchange and commercial law. By January 1857 he had been elevated to chief bookkeeper for a Cleveland merchant, mainly because his limited business training allowed him to determine whether his company was gaining or losing money and to enact process improvements to make more money (unlike his competitors, who generally had no idea they were losing money until they went out of business). Shortly thereafter he started “Clark and Rockefeller,” which bought and sold carloads of produce. For him, the Civil War was principally an opportunity to pile up riches. Once oil was struck in western Pennsylvania, his company took on consignment some of the first crude oil shipments, which reached his Cleveland refineries in early 1860. Known today erroneously as an oil baron, John D. was known as the “Kerosene King,” owning multiple refineries and controlling the trains and pipelines that carried the illuminant around the world. It would be 50 years before John D. found a useful purpose for gasoline, an unwanted byproduct of the oil refinery process. [2] John D. was one of the first to apply the nine Agile principles. Before he began distributing kerosene, only rich people could light their houses after dark (candles cost money). He satisfied customers through early and constant kerosene delivery (OK — he broke a few laws making deals with the railroads, but that John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton The Founding Fathers of Agile Peter D. Morris, PMP, PMI-ACP