Career Pathing/ology - Getting at the obstacles

Great analysis by Tim Ottinger: Career Pathing.

The biggest obstacles to Agile adoption are the built-in pathologies of industrial organization, the ways human motivations are manipulated.  As Tim says,

In a typical career path, employees compete against each other for increasingly rare positions at higher levels. Esther Derby has written much about how this defeats morale and teamwork. In some situations one might find the "kiss up, kick down" strategy to be successful, where one panders to his bosses while sabotaging his peers and underlings. By political maneuvering, he is promoted (even "fast-tracked"), at the cost of productivity and harmony within the company. Distructive abuse of the career path discredits and defames the process.

The command-and-control model of organization (military-industrial complexity!) is echoed by waterfall methodology:  an unchangeable truth is emitted from authority and governs all following behaviors (horizontal) and all subordinate personnel (vertical).  This process gets its energy via the motivational patterns of the selfish gene/will-to-power/original sin.

More to come ...