| | |  | Misc | Home » » » Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management | | | | | | | Description: | | The best organizations have the best talent. . . Financial incentives drive company performance. . . Firms must change or die. Popular axioms like these drive business decisions every day. Yet too much common management wisdom” isn’t wise at allbut, instead, flawed knowledge based on best practices” that are actually poor, incomplete, or outright obsolete. Worse, legions of managers use this dubious knowledge to make decisions that are hazardous to organizational health.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton show how companies can bolster performance and trump the competition through evidence-based management, an approach to decision-making and action that is driven by hard facts rather than half-truths or hype. This book guides managers in using this approach to dismantle six widely heldbut ultimately flawedmanagement beliefs in core areas including leadership, strategy, change, talent, financial incentives, and work-life balance. The authors show managers how to find and apply the best practices for their companies, rather than blindly copy what seems to have worked elsewhere.
This practical and candid book challenges leaders to commit to evidence-based management as a way of organizational lifeand shows how to finally turn this common sense into common practice.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Jeffrey Pfeffer | | Hardcover:
| 288 pages | | Publisher:
| Harvard Business Review Press | | Publication Date:
| March 01, 2006 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1591398622 | | Product Length:
| 9.42 inches | | Product Width:
| 6.92 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.05 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.34 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.5 inches | | Package Width:
| 6.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.1 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.45 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 47 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 47 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
182 of 189 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent studied revisionism of modern managerial practices.Mar 11, 2006
By Gaetan Lion
This is an outstanding book written by two business and engineering Stanford professors. Analyzing modern management practices using surveys and studies, they debunk many of modern management practices. According to their studies, pay-for-performance does not work. Companies that had the widest range of pay scale between top and bottom performers also suffered the poorest financial results. So, pay-for-performance does not translate into superior stock performance. Similarly, forced ranking where employees performances are clustered in three different buckets (top 20%, middle 70%, and bottom 10%) where the weakest bucket is expectedly weeded out does not work either. Companies using this system have been plagued with an employee force with low morale, high turnover, and low productivity.
The authors debunk tens of other well established managerial practices. These practices are often so well established that no one seemed to question them until these two academic types came along. By doing so, they have done a great service to the business community by opening our eyes using the scientific method.
So, why have such practices that seemed to be part of corporate capitalism not work so well? According to the authors' analysis it is because they all foster a winner take all mentality. They reinforce an individual star system. That works well in individual sports like alpine skiing where it is one individual against the clock. The corporate business world is more like a team sport. Soccer comes to mind. One star within an otherwise demoralized team does not stand a chance against a motivated high performance team. In the corporate world it gets even more complicated than that because the team concept extends way beyond the walls of the corporation. Effective teamwork entails including suppliers and customers in product design and management decision. In such an environment, pushing internally a star system that is demoralizing to the 99% who come in distant seconds does not foster optimal team performance either internally or externally.
This book has a wealth of information relevant to any corporate employee. The authors do an excellent job at analyzing existing managerial practices. Besides suggesting a stronger focus on teams, they don't offer any easy solutions. That's refreshing. You know these guys are not trying to market themselves as the new managerial gurus. This gives them much credibility in criticizing the existing ones.
77 of 84 found the following review helpful:
 Good but...Jul 03, 2006
By Robert Shaw
Pfeffer and Sutton's book Hard Facts takes 276 pages (including index) to make one simple point - business leaders cling to miracle cures and don't do the work or homework necessary to become evidence based managers. This is a good insight, but hardly new (try Richard Pascale's Managing on the Edge, 1990, or any Dilbert cartoon). It also treads a similar path to Sydney Finkelstein's earlier book "Why Smart Executives Fail" (2003) and both have similar tables of contents, observations and conclusions. Personally I'd recommend Finkelstein, especially for Chaper 10.
The cover asks "Are you making the right decisions" and leaves the reader to wonder if they are. The first 214 pages illustrate through anecdotal evidence, and some limited analysis, that:
- organizations would perform better if leaders applied evidence better
- implementing evidence based management is difficult
- integrating work and rest of life is good (is this really central to the book?)
- wise people are better than intelligent ones and they must be nurtured
- strategy is something senior people aspire to, without fully appreciating how difficult it is to formulate or implement it
- there are advantages to getting change done quickly
- leadership is difficult and bad leadership is dangerous
At times it's difficult to see the coherence of these diverse ideas, maybe they are nothing more than a list of ideas. I agree with most of the ideas, but they're not new nor original. The test of an idea is in the action, so my expectation was that this book would deliver in Part 3 "From Evidence to Action".
Part 3 is a big disappointment. It's brief, and says:
- treat your organization as an unfinished prototype
- no brag, just facts
- master the obvious and mundane
- see yourself and organization...etc
By the time I got to page 225 I'm pretty frustrated. I plough on the last page, and feel disappointed. I've just spent a lot of time reading stuff I already know, and the practical advice is a mirage.
Evidence based leadership is difficult for key reasons that these authors overlook. Leaders are seldom in a position to control their organizations because they do not have the evidence in their hands to decide, direct, or even influence on the basis of anything other than luck and guesswork. How to get leaders into a position to lead? Well that's a practical question that this book didn't answer, but I sure wish it had
Suggested reading:
- Managing with Power (ISBN: 0875844405 )
- Marketing and the Bottom Line (ISBN: 0273661949)
- Marketing Payback (ISBN: 0273688847)
56 of 61 found the following review helpful:
Jam-packed with intruiging thoughts and evidenceApr 05, 2006
By Coert Visser
"solutionfocusedchange.com"
Ever since I read his book "Competitive Advantage through People" I have bought every book Jeffrey Pfeffer has (co-)written. And I have never been disappointed. All his books both are consistent with and build on his previous work and add new and interesting angles. When this new book by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton was advertized I had a slight worry about its title. It sounds so decisive and self-assured .... I worried whether it wouldn't be too pretentious. Management surely is not only a matter of applying knowledge! It is also dealing with uncertainty, improvisation, choices etc....
But after reading the book, I can (again) say that it is fantastic. It fully acknowledges 'the other half of management' (the parts where you can not yet rely on proven knowledge).
The authors pose some brilliant questions like: is work fundamentally different from the rest of life and should it be? Do the best organizations have the best people? Do financial incentives drive company performance? Is strategy destiny? Is the reality of organizations nowadays "change or die"? Are great leaders in control of their companies?
Do you think you know the answers to these questions? And if you do, do you know what these answers imply for you actions as a manager? I bet you will learn a lot by reading what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton have to say about these things (like I did).
This book is jammed with intruiging thoughts, packed with practical wisdom and a true inspirational read!
Coert Visser, http://www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm
13 of 13 found the following review helpful:
An End to Faddism!Sep 17, 2006
By Loyd E. Eskildson
"Pragmatist"
The marketplace for business advice is crowded with conflicting advice, many of which are retreads of older versions claiming to offer breakthrough results. The "really bad news" is that breakthroughs rarely happen - the wise manager will not simply jump for what is in vogue.
Corporate leaders who want to practice evidence-based management might begin by recognizing that the odds are against them in undertaking a merger and therefore, resist the urge to merge. More thoughtful leaders might do what Cisco Systems did - determine the factors associated with successful and unsuccessful mergers and then use those insights. Cisco concluded that mergers between similar-sized companies rarely work, due to frequent power struggles. They also found that mergers work best when companies are geographically proximate, with organizational cultural compatibility. Finally, Cisco also works to ensure that people within the acquired company stay.
"Hard Facts" then takes a swipe against benchmarking, stating that the wrong item may be copied (eg. Southwest Airlines' fast turnaround, instead of how it treats employees).
As for stock options, a study that looked at companies restating their financials found that the higher the proportion of pay in stock options, the more likely it would restate. Stock-based compensation is an incentive to increase expectations, not performance, and the easiest way to do that is to hype the stock. Similarly, the authors claim that there is little evidence that equity of any kind enhances organizational performance. Many believe in a first-mover advantage; empirical evidence is mixed and unclear.
Experiments (eg. marketing promotions, web-page design) offer a way to generate facts for management; another is to visit customers - especially when less data is available.
An important barrier to fact-based management is that is changes the organization's power structure. Another is that management lore is filled with "half-truths" that work sometimes, but not others. Examples include "the best organizations have the best people (yet IQ - the best predictor of performance - only explains 16% of performance; systems are a bigger issue (bad at NASA; excellent at Toyota, evidenced by its reopening G.M.'s troublesome Fremont plant and then attaining outstanding results with essentially the same former G.M. staff). Another example is "financial rewards driver performance" - yet, Emery Freight succeeded in immediate and substantial improvement using praise, while financial rewards often bring cheating and/or adverse side effects (eg. reduced safety). (The authors also point out that most performance drivers are outside the CEO's control; to be fair, one also needs to recognize that one of G.E.'s strengths under Jack Welch was his insistence on rapid response to environmental changes.) A third is "strategy is king" - here the authors conclude that most research in the area has not been well done, and that which has produced mixed results. Sometimes it is just "luck" - eg. Southwest came to emphasize fast turnarounds during its beginnings because extensive legal wrangling had reduced its fleet to three planes, which it then tried to cover a schedule designed for four; IBM's outsourcing CPU manufacture led Intel into chips, not Intel's planning.
Most change efforts (new products, process re-engineering, major software implementation) fail. But then, those who don't change face even higher odds of failure.
Finally, "Hard Facts" ends with a less than convincing set of guidelines for helping leaders sort through the conflicting evidence brought by management consultants, etc. Regardless, their excellence in pointing out all evidence against and contradictions between various proponents is invaluable. The book is also a call for reorganizing how business courses and materials are presented, so that more useful evidence (eg. the Cisco approach to mergers) is utilized.
41 of 49 found the following review helpful:
 DisappointingFeb 26, 2007
By Strategy Reader
I agree with the basic opening principle of this book, that management based on structured logical thinking, facts, and rigorous analysis is far superior to management based on fads and quick fix solutions.
Unfortunately, instead of building on this idea, most of the book argues from anecdote and uses weak logic or misdirection in a series of chapters aimed at dismissing so-called conventional business wisdom. Much of the time, the evidence provided to support their case is no better than the evidence they dismiss for supporting the opposite case. For instance, in debunking the idea that "strategy is destiny" they quote the Innovator's Dilemma (and the rigorous research behind it) for support of the idea that strategy is very difficult and even good strategies that have been successful in the past will often fail if circumstances change. Then they recommend in the same chapter that "listening to your customers" is the best strategy -- pretty much the opposite of the conclusion in the Innovator's Dilemma.
Almost every chapter has similar logical failures and most present one-sided arguments that gloss over mountains and years of academic research. Strangely, almost none of the book discusses how to actually build a structured, fact-based approach to management and business problem-solving.
In fact, the book seems to be a personal vendetta against MBAs, consultants, Harvard Business School, and specific business authors they don't like. There are some good points to be made on these topics, but the authors use such broad brush strokes as to way overstep the evidence they put forth.
I was very disappointed in this book.
See all 47 customer reviews on Amazon.com
| | |
|
