>As head of sales and marketing, Suresh didn’t need his CEO to buy into the process or give his permission to start the discovery process. He was in charge.
Suresh is a VP of marketing. It's his job to develop a plan, get buy-in, and execute on it. If the CEO is standing in the way, then all this boils down to is that the CEO is micromanaging his VPs. No process can solve for that.
I was merely framing the discussion in terms of what is written in the article, to illustrate what the problem with scrum (or capital-A agile in general) is.
You are now replying to my specific example, instead of my argument about the problems with scrum.
Most people would never think of either pretending that the waterfall model is without problems, nor that it can never be successfully applied to any project. Why, then, is it not acceptable to admit that scrum does, indeed, have limitations that stem from the way it reduces the autonomy of the individual team members?
I'm not sure where "the right people on the right team" comes from -- it's certainly not in the agile manifesto -- but it's just the right grade of vague to be less than useful in practice. It's like saying that every problem can be solved in only two steps: 1) determine what you have to do, and 2) do it.
I don't see any reason for denying that scrum, in its most widely-practiced form, complicates or even discourages certain tasks and behaviors that can be beneficial under correct circumstances. It shouldn't be controversial.
If you put it in context of the situation described in "You Don't Need Permission", doing the customer discovery cannot be justified except through buy-in from the CEO. If Suresh (from the story) has a daily standup with his CEO, then he can't do customer discovery because of the process.