Snake oil is an ointment made from the fat extracted from a Chinese water snake. It’s been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries.
This is something I never knew. I never had the need before to look it up. Just like a billion other things, I’ll only know about in the most superficial way, and that’s ok.
But I got there by thinking about all the scams in the Agile community, the management consultancy industry and the health industry. Snake Oil is a famous health industry scam so much so that it’s now known mostly as a way to describe a scam. “You’re nothing but another Snake Oil salesmen”
Snake Oil aside, I tried to find some real Agile scams on the internet. But alas I gave up. I could not get past the mountains of articles about Agile being a scam. People have been blogging about Agile and Scrum being a scam with such passion and vigor that it’s now 10 feet deep. Strangely the blogging has slowed down significantly in the past few years and was much more popular a few years ago. And now that the Agile community is looking into the real Agile Scams going on. Perpurtrated by Agile Salesmen, with the same understanding of it the original Snake Oil salesmen had of traditional Chinese medicine, all will be blinded by the opinions of angry blogger.
But for now, I would say that if it sounds too good to be true then most likely it’s not.
Let the buyer beware
Christchurch Scrum 