I worked for a VP and CTO who embraced this advice literally: They wanted to hire smart people and have them decide what would be done. They took it to so much of an extreme that they washed their hands of the responsibility for deciding and executing anything. Their job, they thought, was to call us to meetings and then ask a lot of questions about what we were going to do.

The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted.

Instead, it was never-ending circles of Socratic method questions: What do you need to succeed? How will your team accomplish that? Who can you talk to make that happen? Whenever we tried to make it clear that we needed them to do some work in the organization, we got a lecture about learning how to be self sufficient and get things done ourselves.

Not surprisingly, little got done. We wrote the software fine, but any time we encountered issues that required VP or C-level collaboration we hit a wall. You can only defer to IC employees to tell you what to do for so long. Beyond that point it’s just laziness.

This is also a stark contrast to how Steve Jobs actually operated, which by all accounts was extremely demanding, dismissive, and command-and-control with him at the center.