What is most important things SCRUM?

Few days ago, I organized a SCRUM training at one of my friend’s company. Their company just started to adopt SCRUM in their product development. We had lots of discussions during the training session. Scrum Masters or Team Leaders claimed that they did not follow SCRUM exactly and just picked up only something that is the most important things in SCRUM. According to their belief, they chose to do things such as 3-weeks sprint, product release at the end of 3-weeks to get customer’s feedback quickly. And here are the following things that they did not follow:

•  The sprint planning happens with the participation of Scrum Master and Product Owner only. The Scrum master will negotiate with Product Owner about what will be done in the next sprint. Then, Scrum master will assign tasks to each person in development team.
• Similarly, the Sprint Review will happen only between Scrum master and Product Owner.
• There’s no Sprint Retrospective.
• Daily Scrum occurs, but can be skipped if Scrum Master was absent or there’re urgent tasks in that day.

From my point of view, what they are doing is still following traditional software development, with team leader as a centric person. The only good thing is that now they have shorter release time and are able to receive feedback from customers more quickly. However, it’s NOT a Scrum. The most important thing in Scrum would be self-managed and self-organized team. Without self-managed and self-organized team, decisions are still based on team leader only which leads to less effective decision making. As the decisions are come from team leader, no commitment is shared between team members. Thus, there’s a high chance that wrong decision or over-commitment was made.