To borrow a line from "Pulp Fiction" let's not start sucking each other's _?_?s just yet.

"How do you best motivate software engineers? You attract them to significant, life changing work by elevating the need, the thing that's missing from life or society, a problem that needs to be solved, and extending a personal, creative opportunity to solve that problem. Software Engineers are motivated to solve epic problems with solutions that people love."

Let's not try to manage better by making software engineers out to be poor, misunderstood Giants of Action who are just trying to fight the good fight if only the business people would pull their share of the load.

Doctors, lawyers (think family law), and plenty of others are well motivated too. I've done 30+ years of software dev. Software like any other industry attracts a diversity of people ... lots of exemplary but also good doses of risible dumb-asses that no management will ever fix.

OP continues:

"The best way to motivate creative staff is to attract them to meaningful work through the use of strong attractors."

This is where the article just goes stupid and never recovers. Only a moron believes that the employee is somehow unconsciously enabled for greatness but otherwise an empty vessel if ONLY management would fill our need for meaning and direction with something preferably a solid budget, a five year plan, and a goal of staggering goodness. So then what are software devs? The genius of Oppenheimer (smart and good manager?) Linus T? Dirac? Or in fact blank, useless slates that the mommy corporation needs to imprint to get anything out of?

Like 99.9% of all Sunday school lectures this article talks about what without how. So it's largely useless day to day. We're reminded ad nauseam about bad thoughts, bad actions and its consequences but not how --- how to do something better in the day to day.

Let's remind readers of few things:

- Broadly speaking in his "Business Management" phase he forgot to mention that many companies lacked SPC i.e. how to do the day to day and to get away from articles like this that throw around another 10,000 maxims. These same companies weren't customer focused (be customer in not supplier out) ... on and on ... the managements phases he mention forget to mention that even the best corporations in their respective phases waste a ton of money, and a ton of talent not because of high flung issues like motivation and meaning but because of more basic issues like customer focus. Creative management by then is a distraction.

- A major problem at large corporations is not that management fails to play the role of a fundamentalist Baptist selling the good news door to door tirelessly saving us programmer-sinners, it's lack of openness (corporate speak BS), and silos. Those two issues defeat a lot of great guys and gals who already come equipped with meaning, and direction, and a desire to change but who eventually learn the unwritten corporate culture: we aren't gonna change; and if you have a great idea X but aren't in the X department well then it's not for you. Creative management isn't going to fix this; it will make it worse. The whole arc of the OP's story just wholly misses vast swathes of what really goes on in corporations that lower productivity and potential. In particular, the creative management approach fails to admit control battles exist.

- The creative culture sounds nice. Maybe. Or maybe it's a quite different thing. The perpetual ever always need for revolution is necessary to make and perpetuate frivolous consumerism. If there's always something new then there's always something new to buy. Related, there's a vaguely idealistic perhaps anachronistic impulse that any relation in society is a business target: bust it and make money "revolutionizing it".

- Meaning and quality is everybody's problem. You can have superb management and bad engineers or vice versa but if you think engineers are gonna make management enlightened or vice versa you have a lot, lot more to learn. We're here to help each other but also pull our own weight and learn ourselves and not always with the immediate result of gratification, orgasmic release, or profit.