Macro[management] & Micro[management]

Previous Chapter

Short Answer

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2006)

Management, at scale, shares some problems and logic with video games and real-time strategies: limited resources, simultaneous operations, and balancing short-term tactics with long-term strategy to meet goals. The manager who doesn’t know the technical details of the work, or at least the high-level parts of the work, they’re overseeing will only go so far compared to the manager who does understand the technical details.

Macro (Macromanagement): Strategy, such as resource allocation, system optimizations, workflows, and scaling infrastructure to support operations.

Micro (Micromanagement): Tactics, such as controlling and moving around people, assigning specific tasks to those under you, coaching, resolving bottlenecks, and feedback loops.

Too much micro or macro negatively affects overall effectiveness and efficiency. The levels of hands-on control vs delegation should be balanced out to maximize effectiveness in environments. Management challenges scale as you go from oversight on one location vs multiple locations, which adds in more problems related to coordination, information flow, and strategic alignment.

The optimal ratio of micro vs macro depends on your environment, but it is rarely, if ever, one dominating the other entirely in practice.
- In real-world terms, a manager who micromanages (or even macromanages) excessively is, objectively, a bad manager.
If you’re spending too much time doing the jobs of other people, you won’t have enough time to do your own job and you suffer as a result.

Long Answer

This chapter may seem foreign to readers unfamiliar with video games. For those familiar with video games, you’re more likely to connect with some concepts here. Because of this imbalance, I’ll avoid being overly technical, but except multiple new terms.

If you’ve ever played a RTS (real-time strategy) or city builder video game before, then many of the concepts there apply to management. If you’ve ever been a raid leader in a MMORPG, many of those concepts also apply to management. If you read the last chapter (Management Case B) on operations and milsims, any leadership position there also counts!

For most of this chapter, I’ll write primarily towards the viewpoint of a RTS/strategy game player. In this scenario, the ideal manager is someone who’s decisive, blunt, explicit, and direct with what needs to be done. They know the capabilities of their team and know strategies and tactics to meet their goals (“winning” the game). We want to minimize muddling around, ambiguity, and confusion as it causes issues every time it happens.

Real-World Applications

The purpose of this chapter is showing that, if you’re a manager, you are meant to guide actions rather than dictate actions.

Every employee is capable of doing work; you likely wouldn’t bring them onboard in the first place if you thought they couldn’t do the work you needed, right? Since they are capable, you have to let them do the work.

You can assign tasks and you can set directions, but you’re supposed to build up your group, organization, etc. and amplify its capabilities.

Let’s say you’re a manager with an extensive engineering background (10+ years, as a hypothetical). You’re now in charge of a team of engineers of varying skill levels. They may have different issues blocking them, such as:

Juniors/New hires: unable to find resources, figure out problems to look for, or what should be done.
Regulars/mid-levels: how to transition into higher work and level up in their role.
Veterans/seniors/principals: working in cross-team functions, perfecting their technical expertise, and/or working up to become managers like yourself.

The more senior someone is, the less you should need to check in with them. You’ll still want to check in, though, to ensure they’re on track and able to do their work, but not being hand-held. For more inexperienced people, you may do a quick fly-by every day, but older people may be a meeting once a week and masters of their craft meeting only as needed.

It is extremely tempting to go in and do the work for them, especially if you have requisite domain knowledge, but you shouldn’t. That’s micromanagement; you want to limit that. You have separate goals aside from employees and need to look at the overall strategy and not just the tactics employed. Let your “team” handle (most of) the tasks they’re capable of.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Let’s say you’re one company competing against another company to achieve success in a given market. Generally speaking, strategies counter other strategies. Simply put: If an opponent plays one way, you play another way to achieve victory.

This principle applies beyond units and personnel to include tactics, resource management, and logistics behind the scenes.

How to typically determine what strategy to employ is through scouting and maintaining vision of the playing field and your opponent. If you’re aware of what the opponent(s) are doing, you can develop ways to beat them. At the same time, denying your opponent knowledge/vision over your activities reduces their effectiveness in countering strategies and tactics you deploy.

Developing a sense for when to use what strategy/tactic at what time comes with experience, but is essential to dealing with many situations. If you’re not used to how a match plays out, what your enemy can do, and what you can do with your resources, it’s expected you’re not going to perform as well as you should.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is establishing wrong, or no, expectations of what your opponent can do. For example, your might think your opponent will play rock, so you play paper, but they actually played scissors instead. You still need to learn to manage expectations and adapt to overcome issues they bring.

If your “opponent” is the environment instead, like in some city builders, many concepts don’t change that much. Instead of worrying about people disrupting you, you’re worrying about the effects and variables the environment throws at you. This requires practice like before as well as appropriate pre-planning and safety net development to “weather the storm.”

For example: If nature’s hand is “rock” and it decides today is wildfire day, your “paper” strategy to counter it is a fire suppression system to control it.

While strategies may not perfectly deflect or mitigate all potential damage to your systems, a proper strategy is significantly better than an inappropriate strategy or no strategy utilized at all.

Opportunity Cost

As a standard economic theory:

Opportunity cost = (Return on best alternative) – (Return on chosen option)

One of your main goals is to minimize opportunity cost throughout the entire match and every moment in that match. Rarely, if ever, will you make every perfect decision possible in a single game, so the opportunity cost is always greater than zero. You can, however, practice and simulate scenarios to refine your processes, reduce errors, and improve decisions over time.

Additionally, every action can snowball. What seems like a small cost or error at first when you make the decision potentially cascades down the line and creates a larger delay. It’s an act of balancing decisions across economies, upgrades, armies, and other variables. If two players used the same strategy against each other, the player with a small boost in any one of these areas may get a significant advantage over the opponent(s).

Macro vs Micro

Macro is significantly more important than micro. It’s an area many people make mistakes on as they prioritize insignificant contributions or fine-tuning too much. From my own assessment, about 80-90% of time should be on macro and managing orders, strategies, economies, and monitoring the area for what opponents do. Micro should only be a fraction of time spent as units can perform most functions without your direct intervention or continuous oversight.

Doing more than one task at a time hampers productivity (APA, 2006). Even if you could multitask, the level of precision and finesse drastically decreases for all things done simultaneously. You can have multiple tasks going all at the same time though, which is what a methodology like Critical Path Analysis helps to solve and optimize.

It’s why distracting opponents works as a defensive technique and a set-up for an offensive technique. If the opponent falls for the distraction, it’s what they focus on instead of their original goal, which gives you more time to focus on your priorities to achieve victory.

The Macro(management)

This is your backbone, your strategy, or your core build order. Whatever you wish to call it.

It’s the primary guide and routine you follow along, or perhaps know by heart, to achieve victory and meet your goals. It should account for achieving constant production and efficient resource use. Ideally, there should be no blockers, no idle work, and no missed opportunities.

Never forget this core routine must be adaptable. It has to account for emergencies, deviations from the norm, and more. A rigid macro strategy, even if it’s a seemingly perfect strategy, can crumble if it cannot adapt to changing environments and unexpected scenarios.

You can generate multiple routines as templates for different types of scenarios, but you should have one core “routine” at a minimum.

The only way to reduce anxiety and make fewer mistakes is through well-defined planning, properly established contingencies, and practice. Theory can refine your moves, but practice mitigates the chance you cannot commit when push comes to shove.

That isn’t to say theory should be neglected either. If you lack proper knowledge on capabilities of units, what tools are available, and what systems are in place, you’ll mess up in several ways including, but not limited to:

Resource misallocation
Wrongly assigning deadlines
Tactical blunders

Knowledge of the environment and knowledge of technical skills and details is important. Equally important is what’s feasible for you to accomplish in your given environment.

The Micro(management)

This is the part where you’re maximizing unit value per second (or other unit of time).

To put it another way: Say you tell someone they need to clean the dishes. Your macro is issuing the order here. The tasks involved (scrubbing, cleaning, putting the dishes away, etc.), are the micro accomplished by the person working without any further intervention on your part.

Your micro load increases when going beyond the initial request and overseeing each step the person makes. While you could ensure everything is done exactly as intended, this is often wasted effort and rarely ever needed beyond the initial training a unit gets in the task. Excessive direct intervention wastes productivity of all parties involved, not just one or the other.

There are cases where extensive micro is useful, but it is rare and carries great risks when done incorrectly. Generally speaking, a manager, commander, or leader should only be issuing orders, and information relevant to complete the order, to units without further intervention. They should let the units accomplish the “task” to the best of their ability.

As stated before in macro, you still need to know theory and what your units are capable of. If you don’t know what they can (or should) do, you cannot effectively micro(manage) them to reach full productivity and achieve your goals.

There’s also a term called “trading” where you’re balancing the supply costs of your own units vs the opponent’s units and determining your gains and losses by supply efficiency.

If you engage an opponent and you lose 12 dollaroos compared to their 8 dollaroos, you still lose based on how much value you lost (12 vs 8).
In other words, your opponent accomplished more with less and have a more efficient army.

Bringing on New Assets

Alternatively: Hiring or Firing.

Resources and tools may become obsolete. It may always be their fault, but over time you’ll typically have better options. The decision to bring on new resources, upgrade existing resources, or eliminating lacking resources is something you’ll also manage.

The costs to bring in, and get of, assets is typically really high so you want to be careful when doing so. It isn’t just paying a resource amount, but also the time taken, planning, and execution of tasks to reach that point. Doing this wrong can go very ugly, very quickly, and lead to you losing everything in the worst case.

If this applies to real people, i.e. human beings, you’re better off consulting with HR, or a legal expert to determine how to bring on and transition out people. There may be laws, processes, and regulations you’re not privy to. You want to avoid stepping on the legal trouble minefield.

In our simulation case, though, asset management happens as more resources, such as revenue, affect your strategies, tactics, and management priorities. You’re evaluating based on performance, actions, and capabilities of assets rather than the assets itself. Mismanagement can cause issues and affect the productivity of the entire organization later. It may be tough to get rid of something, but sometimes eliminating something is the best course of action.

This also means you’re raising the bar constantly. It might be small increments or big increments, but the bar is rising over time. Early on, when resources are scarce and systems are not fully in place, you may be ok with weaker options to suit your goals. Later on, when resources and systems are set up, you’re less likely to use the “old” option and go for the better options you can now afford.

Allocating resources to bring on the appropriate talent will take a significant amount of time, preparation, and research on your end. While you could shirk duties here and not do due diligence in researching units, buildings, etc., you’ll also be unable to draw out their full potential.

Critical Path Analysis

Alternatively: Critical Path Method

For a more complex example, see Levy et al. (1963).

Putting it simply: it’s identifying time constraints.

i.e. “Does Task B need the output of Task A to begin?”

To give a simple example: imagine you’re cooking food and following a recipe. The recipe has several steps you follow in sequence, one after another.

In reality, it’s possible to do multiple steps in parallel. The recipe may tell you to set the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit, then prepare other steps. While the oven is preheating, you can prepare other ingredients in the meantime, but you can’t properly heat the food until it reached that temperature.

To “map” out a strategy, steps include the following (Paraphrasing from Kenton, 2025):

Listing each activity
Determining activity orders
Predicting time per task
Draw a Diagram (or similar “flowchart”, such as a Gantt chart)
Identify the critical path
Monitor progress and edit

Step #5 requires further elaboration. A critical path is the longest path through all your dependent activities from start to finish without making the project even longer. You can affect how long a task may take through resource/technical allocation, like adding more workers to a job or bringing in a specialist instead of a generalist. Though you can affect timelines, you’re still at the mercy of benefit vs cost analysis and weighing if dedicating more resources to shorten timelines results in higher monetary/resource savings in the project.

Any project can have several parallel or pseudo-critical paths embedded inside of it depending on its complexity. Some activities may be non-critical and eliminated at little to no cost as well, which some activities can start if a preceding task has partial completion instead of full completion. Activities are considered dependent if they require one or more previous steps/activities to be done beforehand before starting, such as preparing ingredients before putting them into a pan to cook. You can classify dependencies in four ways:

Start to Start (SS): Task A starts before Task B starts.
Start to Finish (SF): Task A starts before Task B completes.
Finish to Start (FS): Task A completes before Task B starts.
Finish to Finish (FF): Task A completes before Task B completes.

To quickly cover additional terms you may see:

Earliest Start/Finish (ES and EF): Earliest times an activity may begin and finish.
Latest Start/Finish (LS and LF): Latest times an activity may begin and finish.
Float (Slack): Time you can delay without changing project completion time.
- Formula: Float = LS - ES
Total Float: Difference between finish time on latest activity vs project completion time.
- Generally speaking, the path with zero total float, or the lowest total float, is the “critical” path.
- It is possible to have negative total float, where the last activity takes longer than an established completion time.
- Activities outside critical path can have their own float too, called free float.
Lead: Time next activity can be brought forward (i.e. start earlier) to do activities in parallel.
- Lead only applies on Finish-to-Start (time between activity A ending and activity B starting)
Lag: Time next activity is delayed after previous activity.
- E.g. “waiting” period between submitting paperwork and getting new paperwork to fill out.

Finding float is the least straightforward and is done with two methods: a Forward Pass and a Backward Pass. A Forward Pass goes from start to finish and finds all Earliest Starts and Finishes, whereas a Backward Pass goes from finish to start and finds all Latest Starts and Finishes. This repeats for every activity in the diagram and not just for the critical path.

In a video game or real-time strategy setting, you may see this represented as a “build order,” where you perform specific actions at X time with each action having its own time to complete. For example, you may start building one structure at 0:15, with a 1:00 build time, another structure at 0:30 with a 2:00 build time, and train units at the first structure at 1:20 (i.e. right after it finishes building) with 0:15 training time per unit.

Across all of these build orders and sequences, there’s a consistent theme:

Set specific tasks into motion
Complete other independent task(s) while waiting for previous tasks with dependencies to complete
- This includes waiting for resources (a dependency) before starting a task as well.
Rinse and repeat

Some downsides to this method are its usefulness decreases as operations scale up to become large and complex (Greco, 2020). If these constraints aren’t an issue, then it performs admirably well.

Relating Back to Instruction

Now, let’s tie strategy and macro/micro to teaching/instruction.

Macro is like establishing a curriculum and lesson plan from where you teach material to students. It’s also developing a classroom management plan you can reference for yourself and students so you have ways to deal with contingencies and other emergencies (more on classroom management in another chapter!).

Your focus should be on macromanagement most of the time as your primary goal is instruction! If you’re not spending the majority of time in instruction, then something is very likely wrong.

An exception to the above would be activities, where instead of instructing you’re letting students do activities or labs on their own with some guidance.
In that case, the ~90% goes towards putting out fires and ensuring the class is focused on the activity.
If this were a manager outside of education, that same portion of time should be getting rid of blockers and setting up systems for employees to do tasks effectively.

Micro is when you’re discipling particular students, answering questions in the middle of instruction, or stopping instruction or other tasks to help students inside of a classroom. Assuming classroom management and appropriate systems are in place, this should ideally take no more than 10% of your time in a classroom session. While some micro may be necessary, too much focus negatively affects your goal of guiding and instruction the class as a whole.

You also need to balance opportunity costs. This comes in many forms, like choosing a specific teaching method, determining when to intervene, and handling disciplinary issues. These costs may also come in accommodations, where you decide between ways to legally satisfy accommodations. Each decision carries a cost compared to its alternatives, whether it is time, attention, or resources which could go elsewhere.

Teaching and instructing is, overall, a balancing act of maintaining systems, managing individuals, and minimizing opportunity costs. While you could have one core strategy to solve these issues and reference, you may be required to create multiple strategies, or significant derivations, to legally accommodate students with IEPs, 504s, and other requirements.

Your ability to prepare, adapt, and scale, as well as learn what requires your attention, is important for a successful classroom environment.

Bibliography

American Psychological Association (APA). (2006, March 20). Multitasking: Switching costs. Apa.org; American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking
Greco, J. (2020). ProjectManagement.com - Critical Path Analysis. Projectmanagement.com. [https://www.projectmanagement.com/wikis/233036/critical-path-analysis#](https://www.projectmanagement.com/wikis/233036/critical-path-analysis#)
Kenton, W. (2025, June 30). Understanding Critical Path Analysis. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/critical-path-analysis.asp
Levy, F. K., Thompson, G. L., & Wiest, J. D. (1963, September). The ABCs of the Critical Path Method. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/1963/09/the-abcs-of-the-critical-path-method
McCarthy, C. (2006). No Country for Old Men. Vintage International.
- Original published in 2005.