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Is it possible to build a megacorporation without falling into this management pattern? It clearly hurts top performers, but if you have more than a couple hundred employees it seems inevitable that a significant percentage of the staff is going to have to be shepherded and monitored through their work.

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>>Is it possible to build a megacorporation without falling into this management pattern?

I don't believe so. Micromanagement is the result of two things: lack of actual management skill and lack of trust in employees.

These become more and more common as organizations grow in size, because:

a)Bad managers become more likely to play politics or slip through the cracks and get promoted, and

b) inefficiencies (correlated with firm size) and the resulting decline in output tend to be attributed to employees not working, or not working hard enough - which breeds mistrust.

There's no good solution to running a large organisation. Instead of complaining that large organisations are badly run, we should instead marvel that they run at all.

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