A hunter watches a mountain goat grazing on the pastures on the side of a highway. A speeding truck loses control and starts veering towards the grazing goat, in split seconds it jumps off to a safe place. The hunter’s kid who was watching all this asked his dad, “Did the goat escape because it is agile?”. The hunter replied “It is just common sense to avoid a speeding truck”.
There was a question posted in programmers forum in stack exchange site asking Is agile the new micro management? I am not sure why such an impression about agile has been formed in that person’s mind. It could be due to some recommendations being wrongly interpreted. First of all the recommendations like “a quiet place to work” is a necessity for development teams anywhere following any methodology. Interpreting that as a no talking zone requirement is against improving communication between the team members. My perception about why these kind of wrong interpretations arise is due to wrong sense of accomplishment provided by having something tangible. If someone has to show any progress in adopting a new process or a method then it is natural for him/her to incline for a support in some form which could be seen or measured. This has led someone to believe that following some guidelines verbatim and measuring the level of adherence to it is equal being successful in adopting a new process or method.
I have not been aware that I was part of agile teams for a few years until I met someone who joined my team because it was an agile team. We were a team of 12 people doing weekly releases to production, wearing different hats of Dev, QA, BA and had everyday interaction with the customers. That is how I started my career and I never felt the value of it until I worked in a conservative setup. There was one golden rule of thumb we followed in the teams I worked, treat the team (client team included) as your own organization and do what makes sense to deliver the right value.
I asked one of the directors of a company that how come he never used the word agile though he was part of agile teams for quite long, he replied “talking to your customers often; keeping the code well tested, integrated and delivering the right value on time is all about common sense. There is nothing agile about it!”. He sure left me to figure out what agile meant.
Is there a prescription? Check the answers given out in that forum for that question.
Novi's 
Awesome post dude! I too had stumbled upon that particular stack overflow question, and was feeling sad that, due to some wrong interpretations and implementations, someone was led to believe wrong things about agile (or anything for that matter). And totally with the fact that, doing things the most effective, valuable and right way is a question of common sense, whether it has a name or not.