@marick Sounds plausible to me.

OTOH middle management is traditionally adept at maximising its own role in any organisation. I worked on public sector IT projects that adopted Agile (allegedly). I recall attending daily stand-ups that lasted 45 minutes (midmorning for max disruption) with 30 people, of whom at most 10 were directly involved in development. So it may be true that early Agile could have engaged more with managers. But I wonder if the result would really have been very different?