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

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management | Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert I. Sutton | Find your company in this book and squirm

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Hard Facts, Danger...

	Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert I. Sutton Harvard Business School Press, 2006 - 276 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Evidence-Based Management Handbook

If you want to improve your business results, buy and read this book and then apply what you've learned.

I was excited when I saw Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense on the bookstore shelf. I knew about the authors' work and I thought: "This could be a great book!" I was right.

This is one of the best books I've read about what really works in business. It's also an excellent book about how to figure out what really works.

The opening section is called "Setting the Stage." Unless you're really curious about the movement called "Evidence-Based Management," I suggest saving this for later and start reading in the situation-specific chapters of the book.

You'll find tons and tons of meat in the central six chapters of this book. The chapter titles pretty much tell the tale.

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?
Strategy is destiny?
Change or die?
Are great leaders in control of their companies?

The authors call these "dangerous half-truths" and they mean it. Each statement has some truth and some not-so-truth about it. Pfeffer and Sutton lay out the evidence for both.

These chapters will be especially helpful if you are dealing with a business issue that falls into one of the areas. For example, if you or your school district is considering incentive pay or pay-for-performance, you'll profit from learning just when and how such systems work. If you're thinking about driving major change in your organization, it will help you to know when and how to bring it about.

I suggest reading the six issue-specific chapters first because I think that the chapters about Evidence-Based Management and how you can apply the principles will make more sense after you've immersed yourself in some concrete examples.

So, go in this order. Read Chapter 1: Why every company needs Evidence-Based Management. Then read the six issue-specific chapters. Then go back and read chapters 2 and 9 which offer advice on how to apply Evidence-Based Management in your company.

The bottom line is that this book is worth buying for any or all of three reasons.

It's worth buying for putting a lot of solid management guidance, in well-written form, between two covers.

It's worth buying for the introduction to the principles and practices of evidence-based management.

And, it's worth buying for the specific analysis of six key issues.

If you're in business, you should buy, read, and apply what you learn from this book.

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Find your company in this book and squirm

This excellent book lays out why and how companies fail to drive their business based on evidence, and instead "miracle cure" advice and personal reactions - largely to the detriment of everyone involved. The book quickly lays out why you should take an evidence-based approach and some guidelines on how. The meat of the book comes in chapters on various half-truths that are dangerous in terms of managing people and organizations:

- 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 it change or die
- Are great leaders in control of their companies (and should the be)?

They wrap up with a call for evidence-based management. The book is well-written, funny in many places and slightly depressing (if you don't see yourself or your company in any of the "how not to" stories I will be astonished) but very worthwhile. Some of my favorite quotes include:
"If doctor's practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctor's would be in jail"
"If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone problably already had it. This idea isn't original either; I stole it from someone else
Sutton's Law"
"Treat your business as an unfinished prototype"
"No brag, just facts"

In particular they recommend making sure you have identifed cause and effect when considering past successes, taking account of changing circumstances and establishing why something was effective before adopting it. They emphasize the importance of attacking assumptions and establishing which are pre-conditions for success. The book lays out plenty of evidence on the importance of narrow testing of new ideas before rolling them out, especially in ways analogous to the double-blind study used in medicine. They discuss the importance not of individual leaders being great but of them building a structure within which people can be successful (think Toyota) and they conclude by reminding us that wisdom is knowing what you know and what you don't know while still acting on the best available data and being willing to change as new data becomes available.

I would also recommend three other books I have reviewed recently:
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Tom Davenport's book shows one aspect of evidence-based management - driving company behavior with analytics - and uses some of the same examples (Harrah's, for one)
Making Robust Decisions: Decision Management For Technical, Business, & Service Teams
David Ullman's book is a great discussion of decision-making in the face of uncertainty, a key skill in evidence-based management
The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
Phil Rosenzweig's book disses many of the same business trend half-truths with even more wit than this one. If you are cynical about fix-everything-with-technique-X books, and you probably should be, this is a great book

Lastly if you are more technically minded and enjoy this book, you might enjoy the one I have just finished:Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions

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Rational decision-making: do it right by the book (this book)

The book by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton powerfully strikes at the heart of decision-making. Assumptions and half-truths are the main issues in leading change, instead of facts. This is a management textbook, but should be re-written into a pamphlet for easier dissemination. This is a heavily-documented study of differences between decisions made on facts and decisions made on non-facts. Excellent! Skim it.

Hard to Believe

Pfeffer & Sutton's book is all about how bias and incorrect "common sense" can lead us astray in making management decisions. They show how a great deal of what passes as business management advice is just not all that good. In fact, some of it is, as the title says, total nonsense.
That said, it was far less of a book than I wanted it to be. The title, you see, has this really bold lettering for HARD FACTS. In smaller type underneath is the rest of the title. In fact, on my copy the Total Nonsense is in bigger type than the Half-Truths part (the latter even being gray on a black background). Yet, as I read the book, I kept looking for the HARD FACTS and found a lot of references to Half-Truths. The basic premise seems to be that while most advice is correct in some settings, it is only when it is taken as truth for all time that it becomes dangerous.
I wanted graph after graph of facts from all the studies people mention but never put into digestible form. I wanted to get the translation of management studies into facts that I can use. However, what I did get was basic management book stylistic convention: assertion of some truth followed by an example from one of seven (plus or minus two) case studies. Not that this is all bad, far from it. But it seemed sad given the large HARD FACTS on the top. In fact, I find the convention easy reading. But it doesn't really give me the HARD FACTS. I guess I would have to go into the footnotes (ugh), read all the studies mentioned (ugh, ugh), and then draw the graphs, charts, and summaries (ugh, ugh, ugh). That is what I thought this book would do and doesn't.
So I think it becomes another interesting book that will be put aside for another interesting book in about five months. Are there good insights? Sure. Do I trust all their sources? I don't know why I should since they never explain why they do (the "lots of studies" logic). So maybe they are right, but it is hard to believe.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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