Slashdot Mirror
In Praise of Micromanagement
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Sydney Finkelstein writes at BBC that Steve Jobs, Mickey Drexler, and Jeff Bezos all have something in common. They are all builders of giant brands, very successful, and each is (or was) 'an unmitigated, unapologetic, micromanager!' The modern executive is taught — in business schools and in many jobs — that to manage people effectively is to delegate, and then get out of the way. But it's not delegate and forget says Finkelstein; it must be delegate and be intimately involved with what happens next. Micromanagers must be selective. You can't delve into the details of everything, and in fact superstar micromanagers don't. 'Steve Jobs was intimately involved with each product the company designed, and was even famously involved in designing the glass stairs at the Apple stores. But financial and operational issues were delegated to second-in-command and current Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook.' One key is that micromanagers must be experts. What could be worse than a manager immersed in the details who really doesn't know his stuff? Finally, it takes a strong, trusted team to be a micromanager. Could Steve Jobs have spent weeks with the iPhone design team if there was no one else to mind the store? If not for Tim Cook, perhaps the legend of Steve Jobs would not have turned out quite so well. 'The good news is that the best micromanagers are often the best talent developers,' writes Finkelstein. 'Their attention to detail, their intimate knowledge of the business and their deep involvement in what's going on actually enables more, not less, delegation.'"
What could be worse than a manager immersed in the details who really doesn't know his stuff?
I don't know but knowing your stuff probably has a bigger impact than micromanaging.
You found possibly the only BBC site that isn't actually available in Britain
You can't really extrapolate from a handful of CEOs what a good management strategy is. Very, very few managers are CEOs, or ever will be.
And is what's being described here even micromanagement? It's one thing to "micromanage" by insisting that your products meet your standards, it's another to insist on specific details like underlying technologies or what color the office chairs should be.
On the flip side, there's certain aspects of the old "HP Way" that could be described as micromanagement. But I guess it would be toxic to even mention HP when you're talking about best practices in running a company these days.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
A micromanager who didn't know his stuff.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=PC_Board_Esthetics.txt&characters=Steve%20Jobs&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=high&showcomments=1
Steve Jobs had a vision beyond metrics. He believed in something more then making a profit and pursued that dream. It is little things like that which get missed. 99.99% of all micromanagers have no vision beyond their own paycheck.
Being a manager for a small group of varied IT folk, I think the idea is right. If you could know the requested outcome, delegate it to the experts, keep basic track of the timeline, and be done, that would be awesome. But people are not slurm. Joe and Suzy aren't getting along so Suzy refuses to commit her changes. Bob is out sick. Tom's new and while a great Java programmer is still getting up to speed on the .net framework. John is awesome, but he's just one guy. So you're kind of needed to walk people through difficult phases, keep things on track, show enthusiasm for the project, lead by example (showing up on time, doing your share of the work, being positive, etc).
Or you can just yell alot. Either way...
There are good micro-managers and bad micro-managers. Being a micro-manager alone is not sufficient to be good at it.
In fact, many successful companies have/had more generalist managers in charge.
The article's point seems to be that micromanagement "done right" can be a good thing even though micromanagement has a bad reputation.
Table-ized A.I.
If a micro-manager has less talent/intelligence/magic than his workers..he gets in the way and impedes progress
If a micro-manager has a clear vision, and it's an inspired vision..you would be wise to follow him
Example..Walt Disney
1) Make controversial statement (Micromanaging is good!)
2) Redefine your terms so that actually, it's not that controversial (Micromanagers "can't delve into the details of everything")
3) Spam your headline around the place
4) Profit
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
You can tell me what to do, or how to do it, but not both... This is a lesson most micromanagers forget. The truth is that there is no such think as effective micromanagement. By it's very nature, the project that micromanagers run can never grow bigger than what can be achieved by a single person. They are limited entirely by that person's ability and intelligence, and people with either of those two attributes usually realize it well enough to leave micromanagement alone.
Micromanagement, while sometimes necessary, is anything but effective. Any good manager will always realize this and will usually step out of the micromanagement role very shortly after taking it on.
The exceptions to the rule are always companies where the intended outcome *is* for the company or project to never grow further than one person can manage it. Sometimes ( eg Apple ) - this is the desired outcome - to remain small and very narrow in focus. Generally, though, that goes counter to modern business principles.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I have been reading quite a bit about WWII lately, something I do every few years as an amateur historian. The horrible evils of that war are too numerous to mention, it goes without saying, but from a purely historical point of view, I have lately been coming to the conclusion that Hitler was really a terrible micromanager when it came to war. I understand this view is shared by a lot of historians, but its the sort of conclusion you can come to yourself when you look at the decisions he made..
Now, there was a point, during his rise to power, where he clearly was very good at consolidating his underlings and using his own ability to move crowds to get what he wanted over the long haul. Apparently, he had a tendency to give out completely contradictory or vague orders to underlings, and would leave it to them to work things out. It probably can be said that this worked at least to some effect in the first part of the war, because clearly the Whermacht had a lot of initial success.
Which leads me to wonder if such a leadership style would have any place in a modern business environment; I wonder if any studies have been done on this?
Anyways, he completely fucked up by being a micromanager towards the end of the war in an area he clearly was not an expert in, which was troop movements. For example, had he not micromanaged troop deployments on or around D-Day and left it up to his generals, D-Day probably would not have been a success. He did this repeatedly on the Eastern front, and it's pretty clear that one of the drawbacks of that style of utter top-down leadership style is that yoyu have to know what the fuck you are doing, and he didn't.
And thank God for that, or else the world would have been a different place.
.
Micromanagement occurs when your manager spends more time asking you detailed questions about your project than you spend actually working on the project. Micromanagement occurs when your manager really does not understand technically what you are doing, and thinks that he can look like he does by asking a lot of questions. Micromanagement is telling you how to do your job, not telling you what the goal of your job is.
Micromanagement is not good for the person being "managed", the project, or the company.
It needs to be banished, not praised.
Macromanagement. This is its own form of hell too. This is the "I don't care, just make it work" mentality that simultaneously denies its underlings the things they need to make it happen.
What I hate is a micromanager who tells you to do X and then complains that you did not do Y. Yes, I have experienced this.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's knowing and shaping what your company makes. That's great for a top boss, especially in a consumer products company where the boss should understand the product as well as anybody else. Sure, if you make surgical equipment and lasers and jet engines, the CEO has to delegate that stuff, but a company like Apple? Of course not. Micromanaging would be if Jobs was bugging people about how it was implemented and getting his hands all over the engineering process.
I worked for a company where the CEO was not a tech guy, but he had a vision for the device we were supposed to make. He played with the prototypes constantly and shaped the final device. He knew the market he wanted to go for, and he made his vision happen. He was all over products and marketing and managing customers, but he delegated financial operations and the engineering process to experts. It was a big success, and a great place to work because we all felt like we knew what we were shooting for, and we knew where we fit as part of the overall big picture. We could all imagine what the company would be selling, we knew why it was going to be great, and none of us was surprised when we saw the final result. It was a blast.
A few mergers and acquisitions later and we were part of a big operation. The CEO had no idea what we made or how it worked. In fact, you could go well down the management chain before you found anybody who had any opinion about what the company should be making. The CEO devoted himself to financial engineering and delegated "stuff the company does" to his underlings. We lasted about a year. It's very hard to be inspired by upper management when their "pep talk" is all about financials and nothing about the things your team makes and where they fit in the vision for the company.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Ah, just another insight into the wonderful word of management theory. I wonder if the esteemed people who concern themselves with the knowledge of what it takes to run a successful company will ever just admit to themselves that perhaps this about as useful as trying to understand a winning strategy of casino slots?