“that’s the beauty of Scrum. It’s a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex products…”

No it’s not. Scrum is wholly inadequate for building complex things. It focuses too much on individual teams — yet complex products require multiple teams. Want to build a rocket to go to the moon? — you need more than one team for that. Want to build and maintain a banking system? You need more than one team for that.

Also, the product owner concept, while Scrum has defined its own word for that, is not a new idea. I suggest reading some Peter Drucker.

Self organizing teams are another Agile dysfunction. The average age of the people who wrote the Agile Manifesto was 45 years old. They were all experienced IT people, most with leadership experience, and so they could self-organize. But if you take a typical IT team today, it is not like that, and they don’t self-organize well.

However, I agree with the leadership concepts that the article describes. It should not be confined to the product owner, however. One needs “leaders who proactively confront team members and stakeholders who don’t see a problem and create awareness.”

Yes — and that applies to the technical sides of things too. Most Agile teams are not aware of DevOps techniques, and so if you leave them to self organize and decide how they want to work, they will work the way that they know — which is out of date and does not support continuous delivery.

Leadership is more than facilitation. Effective leaders need to mentor, and challenge, get discussions to happen, and get issues to be identified and resolved.