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Listen to The Closer,cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm

Sarah Green or Michael. I'm talking today with Tanya Minnan,

an associate professor at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

She's the co-author with Lee Thompson of the new book Stop Spending Start Managing

Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits. Tanya, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you so much there. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, me too, me too. I wanted to just dive in and start talking about some of the traps that you

describe in the book that managers fall into that lead to waste or what you call in the book

action without traction. One of these was macro management and I thought it would make

sense to start there because we've heard so much about micromanagement but what's macro management?

Yeah so when we talked in this book about macro management I guess it's a catchy term and all of that but what we were very interested in is that

maybe it's for cultural reasons we have very much overemphasized micromanagement. And micromanagement, as everybody knows,

is the equivalent of a helicopter parent in the workplace.

So the manager is watching your every move,

monitoring you, and the research shows that people just despise

this.

And so when we talk about it in the book, there's a lot of cultural reasons for this right as Americans one of the things that

we say is we want to be free we want to be independent we don't want to be

watched over by other people and so then many managers say, well, if micromanagement is so bad, well, let me flip over to the

other side and they go a little bit extreme as they do so and they find themselves in the macro management trap.

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