One day, sitting around the dinner table, one of your young children will ask what heaven is like. Or what happens if there is no heaven. Or why human beings exist in the first place.
Or maybe why, in 1985, Coke decided to launch New Coke.
One child might even venture to ask, “What do you do at work?” (Try answering that in private first, just to save embarrassment.)
These are the imponderable questions of the family dinner table.
Likewise at work each day, managers face a set of different but equally imponderable questions.
“Should I invest to grow quickly or to grow profitably?” (Answer: Yes.)
“Should I centralize or decentralize?” (Answer: Of course.)
“Should I make or outsource my product?” (Answer: You should.)
“Should I invest in projects with long-term or short-term paybacks?” (Answer: By all means.)
Last week the Wall Street Journal threw yet another imponderable at us: Should the President of the
At issue is a new White House weekday morning ritual where the President and his advisers gather in the Oval Office to discuss the economy. The Journal reports, “The breadth of topics is wide, from the underemployed to childhood obesity, and Mr. Obama often dives into the minutiae.”
The paper goes on to obliquely (but decidedly) cast its vote against micromanaging by reminding us that Jimmy Carter was a “famed micromanager” (and we all know how his presidency turned out, dot dot dot), and by linking Obama’s micromanagement “whatever the merits or flaws” to his stalled agenda and recent drop in approval ratings.
By way of example, the WSJ explains that the President “sometimes chafes at this advisers’ limitations, quizzing them on points raised by critics or asking them to do justice to a view other than their own. At times he quotes from letters sent to the White House to counter a stance taken by his team.”
Whoa. How audacious! What managerial incompetence! Asking his advisers to defend their positions?! Listening to the public?! Wading into the details of a subject as minor as the economy yet?!
Is it just possible that some of the WSJ editorial page has inadvertently found its way over to a front page article? Or is it possible that the two authors of the article have never, ever been (capital M) “Micromanaged?" (Because once you’ve truly been micromanaged you’ll know what it is, and you’ll never mistake it.)
And, by the way, there are some pretty good countervailing examples. There is, for example, a “famed micromanager” by the name of Steve Jobs, and another by the name Jeffrey Katzenberg, the latter of whom led the resurgence of Disney animation in the 1980s. And there was Walt Disney before him, a notorious micromanager.
Having lived through every second of the 1980s, I can also tell you—at the other extreme--that there was a president thought to occasionally fall asleep at his cabinet meetings: “policy from on high” at its very highest, I suppose. (This sleepy president has since become the living embodiment of the Republican Party, a different blog article altogether.) At the same time, the business graveyard is filled with leaders so detached from their operations that their businesses simply spun out of control.
All of which leads to the newest imponderable: As a leader, should I direct policy from on high or micromanage?
The answer is, and you can pass this on to the President: “You bet.”
(P.S.—For a list of truly imponderable questions, like “Can a vegetarian eat animal crackers,” see here.)
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