[AnimalMuppet]

Let's say agile can deliver better software, and maybe even more reliably. The issue is, somewhere up the org chart, there's someone who operates in terms of yearly plans and quarterly results, and there's an impedance mismatch between that layer of the org chart and the agile process below them.

Even if you can really do agile (instead of "Agile"), that mismatch can ruin you. In the long run, it probably will, unless you have someone on the agile side able to talk in terms that the other side can understand. The agile side has to actively manage that connection; the business side isn't going to do it for you.

I have seen the best agile environment I have ever seen destroyed by this mismatch. Upper management killed it because it couldn't understand how to measure and predict the agile development process.