My company just called the managers, “product owners”, and the project managers, “scrum masters”, and said we were now Agile and doing Scrum. Nothing about it was self-managed. We haven’t had a retrospective in 3 years, despite my insistence that we desperately need them.

Huh, my company pushed the Agile/scrum/retrospective thing at the same time as talking about "fit for purpose" teams that would be formed based on need/skills, not the old structure (this team works on this only). Since specific teams were now gone, less need for managers.

The idea was agile/scrum/retros was a way to manage the "fluidity".

This is not at all what Google does, though.

One could also argue that Google by and large doesn't innovate, they mostly acquire the innovative stuff.

It is, however, what Google tried.

https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...