“Donald Rumsfled is a micromanager” – at least that is the criticism leveled over the last few weeks by some of his former Generals.

This is not a political blog, so it is not my intention to focus on the issue of whether or not Rumsfled should resign. I also do not to intend to debate whether or not the accusation is true.

The political debate aside, there are two elements of the “Rumsfled is a Micromanager” accusation that are related to this blog.

1. It is interesting to note how seriously people have taken the specific accusation of being a “micromanager”. The charge is so serious that the President of the U.S. felt the need to defend his Defense Secretary. Bush said “I have seen first-hand how Don relies upon our military commanders in the field and at the Pentagon to make decisions about how best to complete these missions.” In other words, the President and his PR team felt that accusation of being a micromanager was such a seriously bad thing for Rumsfled to be, that he needed to address the charge head-on. If the President and his PR team have read the public’s reaction correctly, this shows that the public realizes that successful senior executives should not micromanage. Given the visceral political reaction against micromanagement, given that it is generally accepted to be a bad thing, it is interesting that so many corporate managers still end up being micromanagers.
2. Micromanagement isn’t the only thing that prevents an organization from leveraging the full capabilities of its whole team. Bureaucracies are just as bad. Some might assume that you have to choose between the two. David Brooks made this comment in his The Good Fight, Done Badly Op Ed piece in this Sunday’s NY Times. Brooks said “[Rumsfeld] was prepared to fight organizations. He was not prepared to fight enemies.” Brooks was making the case that, in order to fight bureaucracy, Rumsfled had to be a micromanager. This is not correct. In fact, there is a serious mistake in Brooks’ logic. Replacing a rigid inflexible bureaucracy with an authoritarian micromanager does not solve the original problem. The problem is that rigid bureaucracies and authoritarian micromanagers prevent an organization from leveraging the collective wisdom of every member of the organization. Both management styles ignore useful input.

Here’s some pictures to explain why.

In these diagrams, the box is a space representing everything there is to know about a specific problem and all the different solutions you can bring to solving a problem.

Why will micromanagers fail? Ours is an inevitably competitive world. The team run by the inclusive manager, the manager who leverages her whole team’s creativity, insight and knowledge, is going to have a broader range of solutions available. Further, by leveraging the collective wisdom of the entire team, the Theory Y manager is more likely to select the winning solution.

When powerful bureaucracies come to dominate an organization, their impact can be just as negative as the impact of a compulsive micromanager.

“That’s just the way we do things” and “Well… a lot of effort has gone into our existing projects” Bureaucracies can be just as stiffening and are equally capable of limiting debate and innovation.

Replacing the bureaucracies with a powerful executive level micromanager does not actually solve the problem.

Even if the executive micromanager knows more than the bureaucracies do, you still do not have a system in place that leverages the insight and understanding of the entire organization.

The best approach is to institute a structured system that is designed to value ideas on their merits

If you want to increase you chances of hitting upon the “right” or “best” approach to any problem, you have to create a framework for leveraging and aggregating the insight of your entire organization.

In other words, you have to work out how to tap into wisdom of the crowd.

If you follow this blog, you know that I believe that the best way to achieve this goal on a tactical level is to improve internal communication using enterprise blogs and enterprise wikis. For more, check out Turing Knowledge Managers into Innovation Creators and The next phase in productivity tools: Web Office.