"So what has gone wrong? Why aren’t agile techniques scaling? Takes no genius to diagnose that problem: agile, trying to scale up from the bottom, collides with the top-down-imposed conventional corporate habits of death marches, rigid hierarchy, and waterfall planning. And loses, because the imperatives behind all that sludge are wired too deep into the culture of most corporations to be displaced by mere productivity improvements, however dramatic. "
This is related to last week's discussion of scrum and its weaknesses, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510943