Microsoft Secrets

In the book Management by Don Hellriegel and John Slocum (1996), decision-making is defined as the “process of defining problems, gathering information, generating alternatives, and choosing a course of action. ” Managers and leaders, and even employees themselves, are faced with the task of making decisions for their companies everyday. In Microsoft Corporation, the middle managers who are proximate to the production line and clients as well that their area of responsibility would encounter.

Microsoft’s unit managers are specially chosen because they are “sufficiently competent” to be left alone without in-depth directions from higher management (Cusumano & Selby, 1995).

According to Michael Cusumano and Richard Selby (1995), in their book Microsoft Secrets, these middle managers need to be equipped with the ability to “respond quickly to new opportunities and threats. ” Microsoft’s view on decision-making is greatly influenced by employee empowerment.

This is what the company practices as people share in the decision-making authority with subordinates. This is very much a process called participative leadership (Gitman, 2005).

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It creates greater commitment among the employees by giving them a sense of “ownership and responsibility” (Gitman, 2005). This is what makes Microsoft flexible and ever adaptive to change. Microsoft Secrets author posed the question to Bill Gates to reveal the key principles behind his company’s product development.

What the author wrote was the Number ten and eleven in his list which specified that these are “Managers who both create the product and make the technical decisions,” and “Quick decision making on technical-versus-business trade offs. ” Indeed, Microsofts’ management is characterized as technically knowledgeable and the managers are in complete understanding of the technicalities of the products since they were former programmers and product developers.

The other statement refers to Gate’s emphasis on instantaneous decision-making in his company.

Unit managers are required to decide fast if there are questions about both technical and business areas. Since most of Microsoft’s managers were former programmers whose expertise mainly lies in IT, CEO Steve Ballmer assigned the company’s Management Development Group (MDG) to conduct a series of workshop among the unit managers. The idea was to hone these technical people into future leaders as well. Thus, the workshops also contained training for goal setting as well as strategy implementation (Cummings & Worley, 2004).