Came across a wonderful article on medium.com by Jack Skeels. The starting point is Jack bemoaning that HBR is now singing the praises of Agile at Scale (re-dubbed "Agile as Anything Management Wants"). According to him, the actual results of agile are significantly below what is promised. Most companies applying agile focus on process, because that's how they think they'll get efficiency gains. But they miss key subtle points underlying the whole thing. Like moving away from digital taylorism. And towards team self-management.

Tons of insight like the following:

In fact, probably the key metric you should use to judge your Agile implementation is how differently you manage and how many fewer managers you need.

During the last couple of years, I’ve used a “Team Ratio” calculator with dozens of companies…how many managers and leads versus team members? This is an aggregate “span of control” measure that reveals how flat your organization is. If you do the calculation, a ratio of greater that 1:8 means you’re flat, and likely have a really good culture, velocity and quality.

Having a good culture, velocity, and quality…where do I sign?

Again, this post doesn't really do the original post justice. It's one I've already gone back to a few times.