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.'"

Comments

Experts

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Experts

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus pretty sure that Jobs and co micomanage projects, not people...

Most micromanaging dunces these days barely knows what kind of business their company is doing. Therefore are reduced to tell you when to poop or how to sharpen your crayons...

Re:Experts

[OneAhead]

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.

I'd say that someone who really knows their stuff will have an inherent tendency to micromanage to a certain degree. If you're leading a project and have the big picture about exactly where you want that project to go, you'll want certain things to be done in certain ways just because you know that will work better with what other people are doing or with the things you're planning to try in the future. As long as the micromanager can still keep track of the big picture and give his or her employees a feeling of being trusted, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't mind being micromanaged, provided that the person intruding in my work clearly knows the aspect of the work they're intruding in much better than me. It's great to learn from people who really know their stuff.

Re:Experts

[MrBigInThePants]

1) Watch a select group of super famous people who were successful for a wide variety of reasons - including many that had nothing to do with them in particular.
2) Latch on to something they do.
3) Proclaim that as the source of all their success.
4) Ignore any counter examples and in fact never look for them.
5) Pretend you are not completely full of shit.

Why of why oh fucking why do people keep doing this?!?!

Re: Experts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Jobs didn't tell people HOW to do stuff he just told them things like the results are crap or it has too many visible screws, it's the wrong colour, needs more rounded corners, it's not insanely great. Or it's finally insanely great.

To back me up: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-engineers-are-being-micromanaged-by-corporate-2012-5

He's like a food critic who usually knows what he wants and has high standards for many areas. Doesn't tell those in the kitchen how to cook, but sure tells them when it's not good enough. You can do it whatever way you want but come tasting time you better produce something good enough for him.

Jobs was not a micromanager and the writer is clueless.

Re:Experts

[anagama]

Actually, this sounds like a Tim Cook fluff piece, like someone is trying to make a subtle point about how Apple is going to be all good because it has Steve Cook, or Tim Jobs -- whatever -- just buy their stock and iPhones.

What's the lesson here?

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:What's the lesson here?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy is totally wrong.
Jobs didn't tell people how to do their work, he just made sure every detail was exacty what he wanted. Jobs was a detailed oriented prick, not a micromanager.

Re:What's the lesson here?

[RabidReindeer]

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.

I wouldn't call this "micromanagement". I'd call it "focussed management". The people in question determined what absolutely positively needed to be done right, studied their subject and homed in on it. They didn't second-guess paper-clip purchases, make idiot suggestions or otherwise do what makes micro-managing bad: interfering with people's work for trivial purposes.

Re:What's the lesson here?

[TrollstonButterbeans]

"You can't really extrapolate from a handful of CEOs what a good management strategy is."

Why not? And what I mean by this, you can look at a handful of bad CEOs and often see what are bad management practices.

History is just studying winners and losers, the environment they were in and how they overcame --- or were overcome -- by circumstances.

The Apple story is particularly remarkable because Steve Jobs and the Woz made Apple --- Steve Jobs gets fired and wanders the wilderness for 10 years with NeXT and such --- then comes back to Apple and makes OS X, iPod, iPhone, iPad.

Few people are 2 time winners. What would be typical is if Steve Jobs came back and then was found out to be a "has been".

Studying individual success stories is "descriptive analysis" -- a field generally discarded by both statistics and science as "nonscience" -- but seeks to understand a particular circumstance that cannot be scientifically repeated nor statistically verified. But yet useful, like studying battles in WWII between Rommel and Patton.

Re:What's the lesson here?

[jedidiah]

Except these aren't CEOs. These are entrepenuers. These are guys that founded companies. They aren't just some guy that came in later to babysit someone else's creation.

These people actually built something.

Labeling these people as CEOs is very misleading.

Steve Jobs on PCB traces

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Agreed

[lymond01]

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...

Recipe for web hits

[LordLucless]

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

Re:A Vision

[epyT-R]

The guy's dead.. the distortion field's gone.. why are you still acting this way?

That's not micromanagement...

[QuietLagoon]

What is described in the article is not micromanagement, it is knowing what the product should be and assuring it meets that goal.

.
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.

That isn't micromanaging

[Copid]

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.