I have seen Agile approaches work (in particular, I've seen and been on some great Extreme Programming teams), but I believe your Agile experience is the most common these days. What I see most often is bullshit labels slapped on the old idiocy.
However, I think this is mostly bunk: "If you have a great team, it will organize itself anyway."
I think you can get to some level of adequacy that way. But doing better requires conscious practice, a shared understanding of how the team works, and a disciplined approach to inspecting and adapting. That just doesn't happen with the laissez faire sort of self-organization.
Most of the assorted Agile processes came out of teams acting like that and then saying, "Hey, let's define and publish what we're doing." You're right that jumping on an Agile bandwagon doesn't help, but there are other ways to make use of Agile philosophy and practices than blind bandwagon-jumping.
However, I think this is mostly bunk: "If you have a great team, it will organize itself anyway."
I think you can get to some level of adequacy that way. But doing better requires conscious practice, a shared understanding of how the team works, and a disciplined approach to inspecting and adapting. That just doesn't happen with the laissez faire sort of self-organization.
Most of the assorted Agile processes came out of teams acting like that and then saying, "Hey, let's define and publish what we're doing." You're right that jumping on an Agile bandwagon doesn't help, but there are other ways to make use of Agile philosophy and practices than blind bandwagon-jumping.