What I just can't understand is how you can have someone as well respected and central to the agile movement as Martin Fowler make the following statement, and managers the world over will still continue to mandate their own versions of agile processes on software developers. Some managers I have encountered even fancy themselves real agile experts. They'll say things like, "I really like that Martin Fowler guy. He knows his stuff. I trust him." But anything Fowler or any other prominent figure in the Agile community says about giving choice and autonomy to developers goes in one ear and out the other. What gives?

And yet what I'm hearing so much is the Agile Industrial Complex imposing methods upon people, and that to me is an absolute travesty.

I was gonna say “tragedy”, but I think “travesty” is the better word because in the end there is no one-size-fits-all in software development. Even the agile advocates wouldn't say that agile is necessarily the best thing to use everywhere. The point is, the team doing work decides how to do it. That is a fundamental agile principle. That even means if the team doesn't want to work in an agile way, then agile probably isn't appropriate in that context, and [not using agile] is the most agile way they can do things in some kind of strangely twisted world of logic.

So that's the first problem: the Agile Industrial Complex and this imposition of one-best-way of doing things. That's something we must fight against.