[arctangent]

Smart people solve difficult problems that less smart people either (a) couldn't solve or (b) would take a relatively long time to solve. This is what smart people "get done". If you're lucky they'll even write the code for the majority of the system by way of proving to you that their idea works. (By definition it is easier to implement a skeleton solution than it is to explain the idea to someone who wasn't smart enough to originate the idea.)

People who merely "get things done" are conscientious in their attitude to work but do not have the spark of intellect that would help them identify quicker ways of getting a task done. This lack of spark also means that they will frequently say that problems are impossible to solve (or prohibitively time consuming to solve), whereas in fact a smart person would identify it as a problem that they could solve.

Example from my own experience within a government accountancy department:

- The person who merely "gets things done" happily spends two weeks each year calculating the cross-charging amounts between all the departments and eventually produces the correct figures.

- The smart person does the same task in 30 seconds using pivot tables and lookups in Excel.