I worked as an applied physicist / engineer at a smallish engineering company directly out of college, where about 50% of the employees had PhD's. When I decide

I worked as an applied physicist / engineer at a smallish engineering company directly out of college, where about 50% of the employees had PhD's. When I decided to quit to get my PhD, the VP in charge of my boss gave me a 30 minute lecture about how a PhD would stifle my creativity and that some of the best people they had didn't have grad degrees. I was a little skeptical of that claim, as the only technical person I could think of without a graduate degree was that VP. He was very impressive, being both extremely intelligent and clearly someone who just absorbed technical material (he had two bookshelves full of grad-level math texts and seemed to know something useful on almost every topic). Looking back, I feel that I would be much more useful to that company after a few years of grad school, receiving a more thorough mathematical and physics background and experience leading my own research projects. Of course you could attribute some of that to just "experience", which I might have gotten just the same at that job.