Sometimes - heck, perhaps most times - when Scrum is involved, some organisations are just too fscked to save. Over time, the "leadership" have reacted to market forces by imposing variations on processes, cuts, reorgs and redundancies. The result is a workforce who, even if they were given total autonomy and unlimited resources, would be unable to turn things around.

Not that these execs would see it like that. Instead, they hear this Scrum thing has worked wonders elsewhere so they wheel it in and, if it fails this time, it's clearly the crappy workers who are to blame. "Management was right about that all along."

I take other commenters' point about strong leadership making a difference. Fully agree with that. But some situations are simply unrecoverable no matter how great the team.