The Travails of Micromanagement

{Excerpt} Micromanagement is mismanagement. What is it that one should decide in the higher echelons of an organization that, given the same data and information, personnel in the lower echelons might not run just as well? Inevitably perhaps given their subject’s compass, publications on management often make recommendations to enrich the discipline and enhance its practice. (Continuing advances ininformation technology and psychology—that, respectively, enable and accelerate globalization and draw from both social neuroscience and databases on billions of individuals’ decisions—will surely broaden the vista.) Startlingly, however, few articles (even less tomes) ever mention micromanagement as an endemic corporate sickness we ought to cure. Our bodies are, to a large degree, a reflectionof our lives: their physical disorders point to what we should look at, for instance, toxic lifestyles (and their workplaces) to which we may be addicted. But could it be that we learn to love our diseases? Do the belief systems and associated (sub)conscious patterns we fashion shape in turn our lives to such an extent that we eschew common sense and come to need what ails us