> "One Wednesday morning this spring, after staff at Washio had gathered for their daily “stand-up” meeting—a ritual suggested in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a 2001 work-processes manual that advocates keeping employees on their toes by having them give status updates literally on their feet"
What an absurdly overwritten way of saying 'at their morning meeting'.
As a reader I felt my time was wasted. Some explanation was in order, but I did not need to know the origin of the technique. "Work-process manual" is snooze-inducing.
Rewritten:
This spring, after staff at Washio had gathered for their daily "stand-up" meeting–in which employees are kept on their toes by giving status updates literally on their feet–operations manager San Nadler broke some bad news.
This draws the reader a bit into the meeting and explains what is meant by a "stand-up meeting" without bogging the reader down in details or the "philosophy of software development." If that philosophy was important for the author to communicate, it really deserves its own paragraph.
How about people drop all the BS and just learn how to properly run a meeting? The gimmickry of the standup is a covert way of saying "no one here trusts anyone else to exercise restraint and common courtesy, so instead we have to come up with these harebrained schemes to enforce it".
The tribal knowledge in startup management is to half-ass a blog post you once read about how to manage employees. Why would someone invest valuable mental cycles making a company run better when they could be planning their exit?