In The New New Product Development Game, Takeuchi and Nonaka described teams as autonomous, focused groups of people, who, when given goals that caused built-in instability had to self-organize around a new directive. In these cases, the manager did not do their jobs for them but rather stayed out of the way and provided everything the teams needed in order to be successful. This wasn't just a hypothetical model; rather, their article was a set of case studies about companies that were actually creating new products this way.
Jeff Sutherland describes the Scrum team as dedicated, cross-functional, self-organizing with a very high degree of autonomy and accountability. Sutherland's description of a Scrum team is similar to the generic definition of any team: a group of people with a complementary skillset and a common purpose. What makes Scrum teams different, then? There are three factors: Scrum team members are empowered to manage themselves, they are dedicated...