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Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
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Sales rank 12,513
Customers rating (based on 42 reviews)
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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 all—but, 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 held—but ultimately flawed—management 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 life – and shows how to finally turn this common sense into common practice.
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| Publisher | Harvard Business Press | | Release date | 03/2006 | | Availability | | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $29.95 | | Our price | $19.77 (you save 33.99%) | | Used price | from $14.85 |
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Forget Going With Your Gut
: Makes a strong case that management should be based on careful research, not fads or pet ideologies. (@ BusinessWeek)
Maxims in Need of a Makeover: Forget those management cliches. These professors say it's time to follow the evidence (@ US News & World Report)
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 Facts always trump Nonsense - at least in this Book - Maybe no the Boss
Lists all the stuff you thought was bogus in corporations and its likely turned upside down by Jeff. This guy is amazing and has the heavyweight credentials with his cubicle located strategically in California at Stanford university. The good news is you don't have to be a heavyweight to understand this heavyweight thinker. He is one of the most highly regarded researchers in the HR academic field. Unfortunately very few CEOs, VP or HR people can muster up the energy and horsepower to pick this one up. Some examples he has pulled from the well research HR field - Why finding mates at the company you work for is not such a bad idea and that your brain actually can grow as you use it contrary to past beliefs.
Clever and insightful
Brilliant book to dispel many of the popular myths about organisational success. Good value, excellent price.
Untying the Double Bind
The authors demand that we think through consequences. They are systems'people who want us to question the obvious and ask better questions. They take the obvious and say "Where is it written..."
Once we begin to reevaluate the "think-say-do" trilogy it is time to realign our thoughts, words, and deeds. Too much of our behavior at work is of the knee-jerk kind that permits us to accept half truths without ever looking at the larger picture. This causes the proverbial double bind that is crazy-making. The authors have an ingratiating style of forcing us to find a better way of relating at work.
Every executive in an organization would do him/herself a favor by reading this book and keeping it on the "look again" shelf.
It is so important to continuously check the alignment around what has become "office-babble". Empowerment means nothing if employees have their hands slapped for doing things in a new manner, if they have to check every move with a micromanager. Teams, as the book points out, cannot be collaborative if bonuses are based on individual competition. And work-life balance means little if perks are based on selling one's soul to the company.
This is a thinking person's book. Are there new insights? The basic ideas have been around as long as people have been trading food for beads. The concepts that make us think and then think again about how to untie the knots that bind, that is new and needed. Highly recommended.
Sylvia Lafair, author "Don't Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success"
 smart vs the show-off
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton discuss the well-documented, although not original or spectacular idea, that "new" does not always means "better". Many examples illustrate how people and organizations make choices based on what feels good, rather than what is known to work.
Lots of powerful contradictions are exposed: the companies strive to hire the smart people, and then expect employees to blindly follow directions. Teamwork is known to produce the best results, yet the compensation structure is geared toward competition and against cooperation. Most people are not motivated by money, however, the companies keep spending time and resources into inventing yet another compensation scheme to motivate workers to work harder.
The most powerful idea in the book is somewhat simple and elegant, if not new: no program or structure or methodology is perfect, all require examination and all have their downsides. Some ideas are better than others, some are worth implementing regardless of their downsides - but chances are those are not the newest or the trendiest.
Easy, but profound
I never thought that I would be walking around quoting a management book. I am a social worker studying non-profit management and this book has validated my years of work experience - how good managers should treat people, when you need to look for the answers internally vs. externally, what "evidence based" really mean, how execs need to combine confidence with modesty, the importance of the team, the use of simple language, how relationships really do matter, and on and on. I think any manager could benefit from this read, as long as they are willing to look at him or herself - the results could be dramatic.
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