Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton

Retail Price: $29.95 LS Price: $20.35 You Save: $9.60 (32%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. Format: Hardcover, 256pp. ISBN: 9781591398622 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: March 21, 2006 Average Customer Review:

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A Better Way to Separate Sound Management Ideas from Seductive Hype

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.


Reviews

"…a rarity on the crowded management shelf…a useful reminder that the gut is often trumped by the facts."

—Business Week

• "Building a culture of truth telling and acting on the hard facts requires an enormous amount of self-discipline in order to not only be willing to hear the truth, however unpleasant, but to actually encourage people to deliver bad news." Pg. 32

• "[I]f we want to learn despite our biases, we might look for failures embedded in success stories and successes embedded in failure stories.." Pg. 49

Jeffrey Pfeffer is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Robert I. Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. They coauthored The Knowing-Doing Gap (HBS Press, 2000).

	Preface	ix
	Part One: Setting the Stage
1	Why every company needs evidence-based management	3
2	How to practice evidence-based management	29
	Part Two: Dangerous Half-truths About Managing People and Organizations
3	Is work fundamentally different from the rest of life and should it be?	57
4	Do the best organizations have the best people?	85
5	Do financial incentives drive company performance?	109
6	Strategy is destiny?	135
7	Change or die?	159
8	Are great leaders in control of their companies?	187
	Part Three: From Evidence to Action
9	Profiting from evidence-based management	217
	Notes	239
	Acknowledgements	261
	Index	265
	About the Authors	277

The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom about Management