Values

As a team (including our Engineer and Product Manager) we are doing some Continous Learning on Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. I've read the book a couple of times now and am in the process of re-read it again for the group discussions. There's one sentence that really stood out for me, which was:

The difference between what I think is valuable and what is really valuable creates waste.

That sentence is one that I had read twice in the past but the power of the statement didn't really hit home until the third time I read it.

I don't like waste. What is the point of doing something if the end result is that there is no end result. Nothing that was done would have any value. That's what waste means to me. If the members of the team I work on all have differing values, then we are inheritly going to be wasteful to some degree. Therefore we, as a team that is part of a business, need to identify what values are important for us. It's subtle yet important to me that that statement makes it clear that teams need to find what they value and actively encourage one other to live up to those values to be more effective as a team.