Comment by austin-cheney

Yes and no. Excellent developers deliver excellent products, like with the Cybertruck example. I wouldn't buy one either, but it appears to be well crafted.

Stellar developers are one step better. Yes, they too delivery excellent products, but they also produce things of value that nobody asked for. Business examples include Teflon, Postit Notes, antibiotics, linux, git, and much more.

The US Army changed leadership methodologies about 20 years ago to account for this. The current leadership philosophy is called Mission Command. In the fewest possible words a leader provides a stated intent and then steps back to monitor while subordinate leaders exercise their own creative initiative to meet that intent. The philosophy before that was called Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). MDMP required leadership buy in for each step of a process from among a set of discussed courses of action. MDMP is now largely relegated to small personnel teams.