When you are in the position of visionary and entrepreneur and innovator, your job is to think differently, remove constraints, and not pigeonhole yourself. But if you are in the position of engineer or technician whose job it is to execute the vision, then you absolutely need to be finding solutions and optimizations for well-defined problems. It is your leader's job to give you the well-defined problems that move things toward an end-goal. Visionaries without the technical support to execute the vision are nothing more than dreamers who never accomplish anything. Techies without leadership and vision guiding them will just work on things that are cool with no real eye on the marketplace. Real innovation requires both types of people. Sure, there are a handful of people in a billion who are both visionary and technical geniuses, but that is not a reasonable expectation to put on most people.