Software business is quite different than other businesses. Mainly this is because in software there are very few routines that can be set as standardized actions, write action plans for them or so on. Let's take retail business - although it has it's own specifics in major part the manager can define in what threshold of goods availability make order to suppliers, or when to put some goods on sale and so on..
In software is different. While in others micromanagement (although bad in general) can be applied in software is impossible.
This is why we have so many methodologies: Waterfall model, Spiral model, Extreme programming and so on...
But where is the secret to success? There is no single answer to this question. But Joel Spolsky shared his experience working with BillG - more especially having him making a design review...
Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables -- and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.
and more
Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before.
Read the whole story (here too) and you will learn some interesting things as how Microsoft made such great product as Excel, how deeply the management should be involved in the details; What is F-counter and how it is related to design reviews :).