The effectiveness of scrum really depends on the team size. The larger the team, the more bureaucracy is needed to manage it.
ADDED: Conversely, with small teams, the overhead of more formal methods doesn't scale down; that is where less structured methods like scrum are most efficient.
What? Was your 15-minute stand-up 2 hours long? If so, are you sure you were doing it right?
Were you scrum-master, and doing 2 hours of admin per day?
What were you doing for the rest of the working day?
I'm not really sure what you are describing here.
Which is just one reason why you do not have 20-40 person teams in scrum. The team size top out at around 12, and yes, at that size you have to keep what you say at stand-up short and to the point. If you find a 20-40 person team, for scrum you will have to break it up into sub-teams.
Was he doing some variation of scrum? Some kind of scrumbut? I won't claim that scrumbut always fails, but it's not hard to spot where this went wrong.
Source: http://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/Documents/Scrum%20Guides/Scru...