In Praise of Micromanagement 136
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.'"
Steve Jobs on PCB traces (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:What's the lesson here? (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
That isn't micromanaging (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Experts (Score:2, Interesting)
They haven't read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb yet.
When asking successful people what their key traits are, they hold up things like "hard working, social skills, network" etc.
Yet - the graveyards are full of failures that possessed exactly those traits as well.
So when you make two columns - one for winners and one for losers, and strike out the traits and properties that exist on both sides, you end up with one single thing that only exist on the winning side: luck.
Luck can be manipulated though. You have to gamble to win. You will fail eventually, so survive your failures. And learn from them.