Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense

The best organizations have the best talent … Financial incentives drive company performance … Firms must change or die. Popular axioms like these drive companies' everyday actions. Yet too many business adages are built on flimsy information,"miracle cure" hype, and flawed thinking about "best practices" When leaders make choices based on dubious knowledge, they put their organizations at risk.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton present a better path: evidence-based management, an approach that has taken hold in medicine and is spreading to education and public policy. The authors show managers how to find and use better evidence in business and why this approach generates superior results.

Through evidence-based management, business leaders face the hard facts and act on the best evidence — trumping the competition. They also view common beliefs about effective management with healthy skepticism. To demonstrate the dangers lurking in such beliefs, the authors dismantle six widely held — but ultimately flawed — half-truths in core management areas including leadership, strategy, change, talent, incentives, and the connections between work and the rest of life. Pfeffer and Sutton describe how to identify and apply practices that are best for their companies, rather than blindly embrace what seems to have worked elsewhere.

• Part One: Setting the Stage
1. Why Every Company Needs Evidence-Based Management
2. How to Practice Evidence-Based Management
• Part Two: Dangerous Half-Truths About Managing People and Organizations
3. Is Work Fundamentally Different from the Rest of Life and Should It Be?
4. Do the Best Organizations Have the Best People?
5. Do Financial Incentives Drive Company Performance?
6. Strategy Is Destiny?
7. Change or Die?
8. Are Great Leaders in Control of Their Companies?
• Part Three: From Evidence to Action
9. Profiting from Evidence-Based Management

If you want to be critical, there ain't that many "new" ideas being presented in the book. But they are excellently summarized, contrasted, researched and presented. What it tells you is that "common sense" is not really that much to rely on and that thinking and acting are more important than having your own pet theory fulfilled.

In short, it was a joy to read, it made you think and gave you a lot to think about. I should recommend it to any aspiring or experienced manager. In fact, you probably can't go wrong reading it!

This is one of those books that you should have read.