English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
This is from a talk on agile teams/enterprises at Microsoft Academy:
Embrace chicken-ness
- Leaving the pigs alone is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it
The slide is about how to not manage a team, so I guess it means to keep your hands off but I couldn't find anything on the web so I'm wondering if there is an additional notion and where this comes from.
Directly from the comments (@Tromano, consider making it an answer, since it is): chicken and pig fable.
A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says: "Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!"
Pig replies: "Hm, maybe, what would we call it?"
The Chicken responds: "How about 'ham-n-eggs'?"
The Pig thinks for a moment and says: "No thanks. I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved!"
The etymology is unknown to me, but the chicken would be a non-committing part of a team (managing the work for instance), while the pig would be fully committed (doing all the actual work).
