TL;DR
The golden rule is "he who has the gold makes the rules." However, that doesn't mean he-who-makes-the-rules is necessarily right or is acting in his own best interests. You can have what you want, but it may not get you where you really need to go.
Control Isn't Leadership
I'm starting my own company and I started putting together a small team, and it's interesting to notice that the more a developer is skilled, the more he pretends to have a say in the implementation. However, considered the investment is mine, I'd like to take important decisions about the implementation myself.
While your question might be a better fit for The Workplace, there are certainly project managers (on-topic here) and business owners (off-topic here) who have similar concerns. However, the problem is more often one of role definitions and personality traits than anything else.
Without intending to be pejorative, your quoted statement above is fairly common among people who are:
- relatively new to business or technology leadership.
- engineers or architects, rather than managers or leaders. NB: Despite common usage, "manager" and "leader" aren't synonyms.
- micromanagers or technocrats, rather than strategic leaders.
- controlling personalities who are unable or unwilling to delegate effectively.
- perfectionists or command-and-control types who have a hard time trusting others.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a product or service to be salable and fit-for-purpose, but embedded in your statement is the implicit belief that others can't be relied on to implement something the way you would yourself. Rather than measuring outcomes (e.g. the software works and is it easy to maintain) you're focused on the implementation, which is usually a business anti-pattern.
The main problem with being a "control freak" in a knowledge-based industry like I.T. is that is drives away creative and talented people. Micromanagement stifles innovation and independent thinking. The only folks who will tolerate fear-based management—an environment where an authority figure wants to control everything—are typically those who prefer a highly-directive management style because they aren't self-starters, or workers who are themselves fearful people. This typically results in a "team" where people do only what they're told and no more. Pragmatically, this often results in slower development and less innovation because the micromanager is really doing all the work, but at the additional cost of having to delegate it out and then verify it afterwards.
Agile frameworks have principles and values that aim to solve many of these problems by replacing inefficient command-and-control techniques with collaborative processes, iterative development, quality control feedback loops, and self-organizing teams that value (rather than stifle) creative solutions that you may not have thought of yourself. There are definitely use cases for more directive approaches, but your original post is not really one of them.
Hire for Fit
In the end, as the project manager or business owner, you can hire for cultural fit. If you prefer to hire people who aren't agilists, or who prefer a more directive style of management, that's fine. However, you own the interview and selection process, and you also largely own the results of picking good or bad hires.
In other words, if you hire people based primarily on their willingness to be managed closely then you can't complain that they aren't people who enjoy working independently. Conversely, if you hire people who are self-starters, you shouldn't complain that they bring their own perspectives to bear on a problem.
Neither extreme is good for development, business, or team-building. Your job is to identify the best balance of collaboration and independence for your objectives, and then deliberately select for that in your hiring process. You'll make mistakes, because everyone does, but if you aren't attracting the talent you want or consistently making bad hires then you need to inspect-and-adapt your organizational culture and management style rather than blaming everyone else.
