Cynthia Ramos just wanted to grab her pasta salad from the communal refrigerator and eat at her desk, but instead she got sucked into another exchange with Jim Miller. Since she’d joined MainFrame as a software developer, six months earlier, every conversation with Jim had been about what a hindrance the company’s project-management system was. On her very first day—in a roomful of new colleagues—he’d asked whether her former employer had used Scrum.1 When she’d said no, he’d chuckled and said, “You might regret leaving to come here!”
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.
