Lately, I’ve taken to labelling these different behaviors with D words: Doers, Discussers, Deciders, etc.
It’s amazing to me how often people want to create a specialty for themselves, where the doing is relegated to the doers, but all the doing is dictated by others.
This happens in businesses, NGOs, communities, churches, just about everywhere.
There is a natural competition to become an "idea person" in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes far less work to produce promising ideas, than to actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that you get from the actual implementation, the worse your ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas that convince executives far too often are the ones that play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the ones which are grounded in pragmatism.
This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they are amazing.
Oof this hits hard. So true. My first job as a developer at a corporation was moving from paper forms to digitally signed forms. We worked really hard for a year integrating with vendor products, saved millions of dollars in work time and error reduction a month, recurring, forever. We even got a nice call out at a town hall from the CEO.... we thought until the name that was called who "brought it all together" was some person none of us on the team had ever met, was never in any meetings, never did any work. But they probably pitched the idea two years ago.
For that, it helps to have good sounding ideas, some existing successes that can be claimed, and to have good people skills. These things wind up being more important in the end than technical competence.
(I gained an appreciation for these dynamics from working at Google back in 2010. Everything that I've seen since has confirmed the importance of this dynamic.)