Every software developer thinks they're smart. Heck, I think I'm very smart. But organizations seem to go badly wrong any time they anoint one person (or a few people) as the guy(s) to make all the smart decisions, and demote everyone else to code monkey.
I worked in a big organization where several senior developers convinced management to take them out of their business units, and put them in a special R&D cost center. They were going to do user interface research that would inform the next generation of products. Now, if this had been Bell Labs, and these guys had all been PhDs, they might have discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background or something. But these were just guys. When the team I was on asked these special devs to do some user interface research for our next product, they said, "Oh no, we can't be tied to a particular product." As far as I know this group never produced so much as a PowerPoint presentation. They were disbanded after a couple of years.
A company where I worked purchased a startup that found itself out of money and on the market for cheap. Their fast-talking CTO was a former employee of my company. He talked my company into putting him in charge of all development in our division, singing the following siren song. "You've been spending way too much time and money on carefully designing and architecting your products. At my company, what we did was just built 'things' and put them in a pile. Once a year or so, I would reach into the pile and pull out enough 'things' to make a shippable product." This strategy had worked so successfully for his last two companies that one had been folded into the other, and the survivor sold to us. It worked so well for us that he went through two years and six million dollars without producing a single product. Our division was shut down and everyone laid off, including the fast-talking smart guy, but not the two managers responsible for hiring him.
At another company, a smart team was created to write a big Windows editor to solve our very complicated configuration problem for a variety of products. They spent 18 months working (not too successfully) on a universal data input editor. But they never considered the complex problem of compiling the input data for each of several rather different products into usable files. They had in fact no idea how to solve this problem. So they never showed a single working version. They built a rather elaborate castle in the air, starting from the fancy gabled roof downward, hoping they would have an inspiration for how to build the foundation when they got to that point.
Moral: The smartest guy in the room needs to be managed just as much as the most ordinary. Otherwise they are liable to go off course and waste a bunch of time and talent, just like anyone else.
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