The weird practices worked as reported, but as an accident of the context where they arose. Outside that, they're about as robust as really rare orchids, which I think to their credit the authors realized, hence all the "don't take our word for it!" with which they hedged around their wildly bestselling school of management consultancy.

I like to say that the outwardly visible practices and processes of highly effective teams are mostly symptoms, not causes of their success. You can't invert the causal relationship.