Quoted: Self-motivated teams aren’t even on the list here (in fact, I’m thinking I should have said not even a tenth instead of not even a third). In fact, I would consider these to be more important. The test of this is to imagine this situation:
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1. self-directed team that has to work on 5 projects without the availability of a customer and is not co-located.
2. team that is somewhat told what to do but has a customer available whenever needed, works on one project at a time and is co-located.
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I believe that with a decent PM telling team two what to do they would do much better than team one. Why? Because team one has so many constraints to overcome. True, team two would do even better if they can make a lot of decisions for themselves. But, in these cases, it is the constraints team 1 is in (something over which they have no control) that makes it likely they will not do as well as team 2.