Spot on. Going agile, with whichever methodology you want, is a mindset change, more than anything else. You can try Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, you name it. But if the CEO and top management aren't deeply involved in that change, it's never going to work.
There'll be a lot of pain, lots of frustrations. Implementing Scrum is hard. Very hard. And it takes a while before the real benefits start surfacing, so most teams will just quit and blame it on Scrum. I've seen and felt this directly some times.
The mindset I have within my teams is to try different things until we find what works for us. We may start with Scrum and eventually fine-tune here and there to a custom process (call it Scrumbut, I don't really care). As long as we stick to what outcomes we want out of it, we should be fine.
As for decision making, I'm all up for having the people that have more context on something to be the ones making the decision. My ultimate goal as Manager/Lead/Whatever is to have nothing depending on me, and that means coaching and empowering everyone on my team do make decisions.
There'll be a lot of pain, lots of frustrations. Implementing Scrum is hard. Very hard. And it takes a while before the real benefits start surfacing, so most teams will just quit and blame it on Scrum. I've seen and felt this directly some times.
The mindset I have within my teams is to try different things until we find what works for us. We may start with Scrum and eventually fine-tune here and there to a custom process (call it Scrumbut, I don't really care). As long as we stick to what outcomes we want out of it, we should be fine.
As for decision making, I'm all up for having the people that have more context on something to be the ones making the decision. My ultimate goal as Manager/Lead/Whatever is to have nothing depending on me, and that means coaching and empowering everyone on my team do make decisions.