He was discussing how agile maps to CMM. I took it more as a way to use CMM, which has some executive-level acceptance, to justify or explain agile.

Yup.
Yes, I'm very aware of how it generally comes to pass that companies ask for heroic efforts from individual employees.
You're focusing on the time aspect of "heroic efforts". I completely agree that heroic time commitments are a huge red flag. In fact the article supports something I said earlier in (I believe) this thread: Most programming work does not require genius. Yes, the cutting-edge stuff Todd described probably does.

I believe you've said it before, but I don't think you said it in this thread.

About heroism, it isn't just heroic time efforts that are bad. It is also bad (albeit for different reasons) to depend on someone having a brilliant flash of insight to be able to get a project done. It is great to have someone have a brilliant flash of insight and then start a project. It is great for a project to be simplified by a brilliant flash of insight. But it is bad to depend on that.
But your "good" problem is also bad. If the whole spec was "speed it up by 10%", that's a bad project to commit someone to. Perhaps it can't be sped up by 10% at all.
You mean it can't be done with new code on the existing hardware, right? Some problems can be solved by throwing hardware at it. What if you're at a small company with a single DB server that's got 2GB of ram in it. How much does another 2GB cost? What does one week of programmer salary cost?

I didn't mean "with new code on the existing hardware". I did mean "at acceptable cost".

For instance at my job, search is a major technical problem. But the easy bullets have mostly been fired. For instance I believe that you aren't going to improve our hardware without spending 5 or 6 figures on it.

There are a few bullets left. There is a caching improvement scheduled that will let us scale another 50% or so. (The primary concern is not time users spend doing a search, it is how many concurrent users we can support without melting down.) And we're about to upgrade our database to 10G, and there is a real possibility that we'll be able to find an easy improvement or two after doing so. Plus we're scheduling hardware improvements, I think for the fall.

While you were posing a hypothetical question, I'm giving answers based on a very real example which I know a fair amount about.
That's actually a good example of what I mean when I say I'm interested in giving users what they need. Programmers want to write code. IT directors want to develop systems. Operatoins people want solutions. Sometimes the best solution doesn't involve IT.

Sometimes the best solution requires all groups to cooperate. That's certainly been the case with search for us.
BTW there is a certain irony that you'd respond to a post titled, Well, what do YOU mean by accomplishment? with a response where you say, assuming you understand what I mean by accomplishment...
That followed four paragraphs of explaining what I meant. Perhaps I should have written, "Assuming you now understand ..."

That was a bad assumption. I feel no closer than I did before to knowing when you will or will not feel a sense of accomplishment.

But let's leave that point. It isn't important.

Cheers,
Ben