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About the Book
We listen as if crossing thin ice because change, uncertainty, and ambiguity are everywhere.
We test like a boat on dark water so that carelessness, haste and imbalance won't sink us.
We adapt like a stranger to a far shore to give and take what the market takes and gives.
We simplify like a melting snowflake because our systems grow as rigid and inefficient as one.
We connect as the deep woods to sustain continuous growth across cycles of change.
We lead as a valley does the river to quicken and join channels of mutual benefit.
We share as its silt feeds the fields to open bottlenecks and foster innovation.
About the Author
Peter is credited in the first Agile book and keynoted the first Agile conference. He began work on his translation of Lao Tzu in the 80s, introduced it to Ward's Wiki in the 90s, and his talk on it at XP2K became the first chapter of the second XP book in 2001.
Heart-Of-Agile creator and Manifesto author Alistair Cockburn linked Peter's Lao Tzu on the front page of his blog for several years. In 2009, it was adapted as the bible of Dudeism, the Coen Brothers' "Big Lebowski" religion, in Oliver Benjamin's "Dude De Ching". And it was one of the most popular translations in China for decades.
In the 2010s Peter restarted his translation using the Chinese dictionaries gathered by Bradford Hatcher for his 2009 "Lao Tzu Word by Word". But now, instead of merely polishing the pieces of the old puzzle, Peter set about assembling into a consistent and logical whole.
Solving a six-dimensional jigsaw puzzle where each piece has dozens of different faces is a daunting task. Peter's key realization here is that "sheng ren", traditionally translated into English as "the sage", originally meant the agile one or the agile ones ... or agility itself. So the Tao was always Agile, and, through Peter, Agility was always based on the Tao.