This is one of my favourite blog posts of all time: Choose a single layer of cleverness by David Heinemeier Hansson. It might not even be the right point of view, but the clarity of thought and ability to see it through makes this attitude refreshing.
In a world where we are plagued by design-by-commitee pain, the success of Ruby on Rails and Firefox (who also employed this sort of "benevolent dictator" attitude) should be drawing a lot of worried glances from bad project managers.