I was slow to embrace Agile because of the way in which I was introduced to it. Some of the practices seemed to be cowboy coding but that is slandering the cowboy coders. I now know that what was introduced to me as Agile was anything but.
The things that corrected my view were a couple of colleagues. One wrote a blog piece called "The disciplines of agile" and the other was brilliant at teaching through examples and game play.
I also read Fred P Brooks Mythical Man Month book. One of the essays mentions a colleague advocating something that sounds like a progenitor of Agile. Fred's book was published in 1975 and was a look back over 25 years in the fledgling IT industry. The 1995 edition explicitly acknowledges the value of certain practices that make up Agile methodologies.
I've become a fan of Agile despite of the efforts of the consultancy that was paid to introduce it. If I can become a convert despite a toxic start there has to be something in it!