What’s the point in delivering something both you and the customer know is wrong, when you can turn around and fix it instead? The point is delivering something of value instead of delivering something you agreed upon half a year ago.
Some tasks require longer attention spans. This is the classic technical debt accumulation choke point. Now, iterations + deadlines make sense. But does it have to be a fixed 2/3 week period, always? Where the flexibility in that?
The text says "couple of weeks to a couple of months", not 2/3 weeks. If a task requires a longer attention span than two months, you should probably break it down and deliver something of value earler on. As you say yourself: "the market won’t wait for you to implement them".
To be fair, I've only seen Scrum. But this point is in direct contradiction. Scrum is about diluting the individual. Everyone is a replaceable resource.
What a nice way of motivating people. Every person in a good team is of big value, and cannot easily be replaced by anyone else. Creating a good team requires thought and planning. If Scrum is about diluting the individual, then Scrum is far more wrong than I originally thought.
This is just wishful-thinking, the Agile Point. The only remotely close way of doing this is turning everyone into cogs in a machine. No, thanks. Weren't we valuing the individual?
When you motivate people, and give them tasks they like, they tend to perform their best. Turning people into cogs in a machine, as Scrum seems to like, is not a good way of motivating them. As the manifesto says: value the individual and motivate them, and they will get the job done.
And takes time. Ops, sprint's time is over. I guess that refactoring can wait.
And that is why you don’t care about sprints. You do one task, preferably as small as possible, and deliver it when it is done. That’s it. I have never understood why I should spend loads of time planning what I should do the next N weeks, when I can just do it instead.
Some of the most successful products and projects (Linux, Python, Apple) revolve around strong leadership.
Having strong leaders around a self organizing team is not necessarily problematic. Self organizing teams are more about giving the team freedom to work the way they want. A manager or leader can then contribute by removing obstacles and ensure the team has everything it needs instead of micromanaging everything.
The most important part of The Agile Manifesto, in my opinion, is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". If you care more about the process than you do of the people in the team, you are doing it wrong.
EDIT: formatting.