This is probably one of the hardest things for many companies to grasp today. One of the things I do for a living is give full-day presentations to companies looking at Agile from a "strategic" position. In short, companies often do agile development, but they still lay down hard deadlines, micro-manage projects, and provide command-and-control rather than support-and-deliver. This problem is the elephant in the room of agile: what do we do with managers when we have self-directed teams?<p>If you look at the Feudal era (this is a gross oversimplification and varies wildly from from country to country), we had a king who gave land/authority to dukes, who gave land/authority to barons, who gave land/authority to knights, who had serfs work their fiefs. In return, the serfs had a place to live and gave food and goods to the knights, who pledged service to their liege, who pledged service to theirs, up to the king. The king also taxed every level of this and made orders of magnitude more money than the serfs.<p>There were a couple of interesting side-effects of this. First, while you were technically loyal to your king, he didn't have much day-to-day impact and your loyalty was to those immediately surrounding you. Communication throughout the realm was slow or non-existent, further isolating communities. Politics were local, not national, and these made made medieval intrigues all the more fascinating. Second, there were <i>no price signals</i> inside of a feudal society. As a result, you couldn't have a functioning economy in the modern sense.<p>And then about 300 years ago we had more and more international trade and many lords discovered that by displacing their peasants/serfs they could do things such as raise sheep and sell the wool for a far greater profit than having people harvesting food[1]. So you wound up with a bunch of free men traveling the land, selling their services where they could. In other words, you had one of the foundations to a modern economy: a mobile labor force.<p>Today, that feudal model still exists: inside of many large corporations. It's a mess of internal politics. People have loyalty to their teams and maybe their boss, but not so much to Steve Ballmer. There are few, if any, internal price signals. <i>Internally</i>. If you commit "treason" by suggesting Ballmer should be fired, you might get laid off, but not executed. You have hiring and firing instead of births and deaths to maintain the work force. In may respects, the modern corporation resembles the old feudal system, but sped up many times. And the king/CEO still earns orders of magnitude more money than the workers/serfs, completely out of proportion to actual value provided.<p>Agile itself had its roots back in the 50s, but as a modern movement in programming, agile is still just over a decade old. We don't know what's happening to the traditional role of management, but the feudal system couldn't compete with capitalism. I don't think that traditional corporations can, either.<p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Enclosures_and_the_transition_from_feudalism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Enclosure...</a><p><i>Edit</i>: A couple of tiny clarifications.