I think you have confused the Agile Manifesto which was indeed created in a ski lodge during a "Agile conference" (more likely jolly) - but at Snowbird which is in the US not the Alps. Also the Rugby references came from some Japanese "dudes" from a paper called the New New Product Development Game (Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka) - so I don't think the Brits can take credit for this. I'm sure you are right about the horror stories around dodgy adoption of Agile, but there will be many similar stores about Waterfall, Kansan, SAFe, or any other approach/framework. Equally there will be lots of positive stories for all of the above. Not saying Agile is perfect, but worth maintaining some balance - the alternatives may be even more painful! Always good to read different perspectives though, so thanks for writing :-)