A 1978 USNI Proceedings essay on NR and leadership[1], which won a bunch of prizes, had this great description of Rickover's micromanagement: "Each nuclear submarine is commanded by two people: its captain and the Director, Division of Naval Reactors [Rickover]. The captain has full responsibility for the military operations of his ship as well as for power plant safety. He also has full authority over the military operations. NR has much of the authority over the power plant; its Director has been known to place a call to a submarine’s engineering space telephone and then personally direct the commanding officer how to organize his watch bill."
That level of micromanagement wasn't great inside the US Navy, a military organization (hence the essay) and would have spectacularly bombed and flamed out in the civil power world and is also not a great idea for the commercial world at large. This is why taking Rickover as a model is something that you should do very very carefully. He did some things right, but a whole lot of things can't be brought over to your company, in a way that suggests using him as a baseline takes you further away from a good answer.
I wrote a paper decades ago comparing Rickover and Jackie Fisher- of HMS Dreadnought/HMS Invincible fame- as technological entrepreneur's introducing new technology into their respective fleets. And one lesson I took away was that both of them took a whole lot of advantage of being in a military service where they could issue orders and have them be legally obeyed in a way that commercial people just can't get away with. Employees will just leave your company if you tried a bunch of the crap that Rickover did.
[1]: A badly OCR'd version of the essay is available here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1978/july/leaders... The author, then Lt Ralph Chatham, would go on to have the first ever novel published by the US Naval Institute Press dedicated to him. "To Ralph Chatham, a sub driver who spoke the truth" is how Tom Clancy's _Hunt for Red October_ begins.
e: "In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."
