If you were in the soft drink industry, what one piece of information would you absolutely covet that, if you had it, would make you believe that your success is a foregone conclusion? Maybe the recipe for Pepsi? Or how about if you were an automobile manufacturer? Perhaps the schematics for Toyota's hybrid powertrain from the Prius would make your mouth water.

Now these are hypothetical situations, of course (assuming you're not planning to pull off The Italian Job). But wait! If you're an engineering manager in the software industry, you might actually have the Recipe For A Successful Organization And Product. Joel Spolsky over at his blog describes the "Development Abstraction Layer", a means to let the key players in an organization to do what they do well, with no extraneous distractions. I quote an interesting excerpt below:
"A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that's so comfortable you don't feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can't see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1."
This may actually sound like the idealistic dreams of a programmer in La-La land, but I think he is absolutely on to something. If nothing else, he runs a successful company where he implements all of the above.

However, while his article appears developer-centric, I would extend this to envelop other roles in engineering as well, namely, testers and program managers. Their roles are equally crucial.

My 2 paise.