Is hard work hard?

Sometimes I hear people saying that they work "hard". And they really do; they stay long, held meetings, send tons on e-mails and also produce code. Sounds good.
My only trouble is that I hear it when deadlines are missed, task not done, planning forgotten and the trouble is there.
What's wrong? Most of these people really work hard, why can't they do the job?
After a while I see some patterns in these people's behavior:

• Week cooperation. On the surface the cooperation sometimes seem to be OK. But these people don't like to delegate, and are inclined to override decisions made by others. As subordinates they prefer to work alone.
• Short time thinking. The task being done is isolated, it relations to other or subsequent tasks is not considered. It leads to rework, lack of reuse, hidden problems (e.g. lack of scalability, maintenance or operation issues).
• There are hidden assumptions which are non known for several participants, and even those who make these assumptions don't consider their consequences.
• Last minute changes. The changes are always constrained by others (customers, business) so our person is innocent. Somehow it always happens?
• Fierce activity and/or martyrdom at the final stage of the project.
• Never ending projects. There is always something to fix or missing. Projects or project phases are not finished.

On the other hand there are people who simple deliver without much fuss. They avoid the mistakes above. However they also loose a very effective communication tool: if they task are never a subject of discussions, if they don't send many e-mails and don't have plenty of meetings, than nobody knows that they do important work.

I don't think there is an ultimate solution. However setting up rules, do good project management, applying best practice and development methodologies can help. But the manager of the team leader has to take care for real and "visible" performers as well.