Why founders fail: the product CEO paradox
Joel Spolsky (remember him :-) gave us a great example of how Bill Gates did product reviews in the early '90s: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html  E.g.:"He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."And the article details how those two were intimately linked.