... I've sort of had a different experience. I've been in roomfuls of "ideas people" and I've been in roomfuls of "execution people" and in roomfuls of "tell me what to do people."

None are effective in isolation. If your CEO / tech lead is an idea people, your COO / project manager an "execution people," and the team "tell me what to do people" things work pretty amazingly.

I think the problem is that people like to hire people like themselves, so a balance is hard to find. Each group is self-perpetuating.

I'll mention: I stated my career in roomfuls of idea people, and was deeply surprised the first time I ran into a "tell me what to do" person. That person worked hard, and was possibly the best software engineer I've worked with, but:

(1) Deeply didn't care about much beyond coding.

(2) Valued having people around him who can structure his work so it has meaningful impact.

Personally, I really benefit from having a watchful project manager to keep me on track. Once I gave up on doing that myself, my productivity skyrocketed. I tend to empower project managers (and admins and similar roles) to boss me around much more than the job description entails.