" The slightly obscured secret that you may not know is that the Leads of Leads are running the company. That’s right—all those fancy Directors running around looking important and emitting those pithy one-liners on productivity—they are dependent on the Leads of Leads to make sure the work actually gets done. This is not to suggest that the Director role isn’t essential, as we’ll see it is in a moment, but these Leads of Leads, these folks who are ridiculed for being “middle management,” they are the people and process machinery that keeps the machine running efficiently. "

― Michael Lopp , Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager