I agree that management is a discipline that which has forethought and planning at its heart, and generally requireses delegation and follow through to be effective, but I am not seeing any of this in these cases.

You state these were staff level decisions (perhaps we have a different idea of staff), but it seems to me every single one of the "bonehead" decisions was made by an ill informed and undiciplined manager (someone in charge of making some decisions) attempting to assert authority and becoming too involved in the technical details (the last part was taken from your definition of micromanagement). In my way of thinking, dictator and micromanager are terms that are easily interchangeable in the provided examples.

How these managers came up through the ranks and their level of competence (or lack thereof) perhaps explains part of the problem, but the bottom line is they didn't guide the direction or delegate the task, they decided how it should be done in specific detail.