Management half-truths and nonsense: How to practice evidence-based management

California Management Review

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2006, Pages

  Pfeffer, Jeffrey ^a   Sutton, Robert I ^b  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Stanford University   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33744762776     PISSN: 00081256     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/000812560604800301     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Alex Taylor III, "How Toyota Defies Gravity," Fortune, December 8, 1997, pp. 100-108;
2. Michael N. Kennedy and Allen Ward, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It (Richmond, VA: Oaklea Press, 2003).
3. Kevin Patterson, "What Doctors Don't Know (Almost Everything)," New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2002, p. 77.
4. Rakesh Khurana, Searching for the Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
5. This estimate is based on counts of business magazines and newspapers listed on Yahoo.com for a search done in October 2002.
6. This estimate is based on information provided on barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com.
7. Peter Meyers, "Cranky Consumer: Rating Business-Book Summaries," Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2002.
8. Perseus Publishing, Business: The Ultimate Resource (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002).
9. Compare, for instance, the recommendations that come from Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001)
10. with those from Tony Alessandra, Charisma: Seven Keys to Developing the Magnetism That Leads to Success (New York, NY: Warner, 1998).
11. Bill Jensen, Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster (New York, NY: Perseus, 2001);
12. Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier (New York, NY: Free Press, 2000).
13. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, The Strategy-Focused Organization (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000);
14. Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (New York, NY: Free Press, 1993).
15. On small New York- and San Francisco-based consulting firms specializing in organizational and cultural change and strategy implementation, The Trium Group does do follow-up surveys to see if changes in knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and results come from its work with clients. Also, the firm has a three-tier pricing model in which clients voluntarily decide whether to pay more if the project has exceeded their goals and expectations, an agreed upon amount if it has met objectives, or less if the project did not deliver all that was expected. This provides an incentive for the company to do good work, not just sell business.
16. Darrell Rigby, "Management Tools and Techniques: A Survey," California Management Review, 43/2 (Winter 2001): 139-160.
17. Jack Welch quote from Workforce Management magazine, available on line at 〈www.work-force.com/archive/feature/23/47/39/234742.php〉.
18. For a review of just some of the literature on this issue, see Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1986),
19. particularly chapter 3, "Is Competition More Productive?"
20. and chapter 10, "Learning Together."
21. Paul Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
22. Michael Porter and Gregory C. Bond, "Robert Mondavi: Competitive Strategy," Case 799-124, Boston, MA, Harvard Business School, 1999.
23. Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, The War for Talent (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). The appendix makes clear that the dependent variable, total shareholder return, was for the years prior to the particular year the survey was done to gather the information on management practices. Performance data for the prior 10 years were correlated with current practices for the 77 firms participating in their 1997 survey; performance data for the prior three to five years were correlated with current performance for the 2000 survey. If the authors' temporal logic were applied to research on the link between smoking and lung cancer, the conclusion would be that lung cancer causes smoking.
24. Jerker Denrell, "Vicarious Learning, Undersampling of Failure, and the Myths of Management," Organization Science, 14 (2003): 227-243.
25. Jerker Denrell, Organization Science, Ibid., 229.
26. Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan, "Automobile Manufacturers," in G.R. Carroll and M.T. Hannan, eds., Organizations in Industry (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 195-214.
27. Denrell, Organizations in Industry, op. cit., p. 228.
28. D. Eden and A.B. Shani, "Pygmalion Goes to Boot Camp: Expectancy, Leadership and Trainee Performance," Journal of Applied Psychology, 67 (1982): 194-199;
29. R. Rosenthal and D. B. Rubin, "Interpersonal Expectancy Effects: The First 345 Studies," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (1978): 377-386;
30. Brian D. McNatt, "Ancient Pygmalion Joins Contemporary Management: A Meta-Analysis of the Result," Journal of Applied Psychology, 85 (2000): 314-322.
31. For example, see Alexander G. Stajkovic and Fred Luthans, "Differential Effects of Incentive Motivators on Work Performance," Academy of Management Journal, 44 (2001): 580-591;
32. Richard W. Griffin, "Objective and Social Sources of Information in Task Redesign: A Field Experiment," Administrative Science Quarterly, 28 (1983): 184-200;
33. Gregory R. Oldham and Daniel J. Brass, "Employee Reactions to an Open-Plan Office: A Naturally Occurring Quasi-Experiment," Administrative Science Quarterly, 24 (1979): 267-284.
34. See 〈www.bain.com〉.
35. We wrote to George Cogan, a senior partner at Bain, about this "correlation is not causation" problem. He readily acknowledged that this was so and pointed out that Bain's training materials emphasize that "we obviously cannot claim credit for these results" but this disclaimer is conspicuously absent from the Bain Web site. As we go to press, the claim that "our clients outperform the market 4 to 1" (up from 3 to 1) is the first thing visitors see when they go to bain.com, and the implication that Bain is responsible for this superior performance remains, accompanied by the statement: "Companies that outperform the market like to work with us; we are as passionate about their results as they are." (Quotes from George Cogan are from an e-mail exchange with Robert Sutton on September 17, 2005.)
36. John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1941), 3.
37. G. MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace (New York, NY: Viking, 1996).
38. Andrea Gabor, "Quality Revival, Part 2: Ford Embraces Six Sigma," New York Times, June 13, 2001.
39. Keith H. Hammonds, "Grassroots Leadership - Ford Motor Co.," Fast Company, April 2000, pp. 138-143.
40. Keith H. Hammonds, "Grassroots Leadership - Ford Motor Co.," Fast Company, 2000, pp. 138-143. Ibid.
41. See, for instance, M.A. Mone and W. McKinley, "The Uniqueness Value and Its Consequences for Organization Studies," Journal of Management Inquiry, 2 (1993): 284-296.
42. See Andrew Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
43. Alfie Kohn, "Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work," Harvard Business Review, 71/5 (September/October 1993): 3-7;
44. Jeffrey Pfeffer, "Six Dangerous Myths About Pay," Harvard Business Review, 76/3 (May/June 1998): 107-119;
45. Egon Zehnder, "A Simpler Way to Pay," Harvard Business Review, 79/4 (April 2001): 3-8.
46. See 〈www.gladwell.com〉.
47. A famous sociologist wrote a charming book that tries, but ultimately fails, to track down the originator of this saying. See Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (New York, NY: Free Press, 1965).
48. See, for instance, Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005). In spite of the title, the book details the large number of different people involved with this important technological invention, and Noyce's important but limited role in the entire enterprise.
49. "The 2002 HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for Today's Business Agenda," Harvard Business Review, 80/3 (March 2002): 58-59.
50. James March, e-mail to Robert Sutton, November 2, 2002.
51. Russell L. Ackoff, "Management Gurus and Educators," Reflections, 2 (2001): 66-67.
52. Stefan Stern, "Guru Guide," Management Today, October 2001, 82-87. Quote is from page 87.
53. Mary J. Benner and Michael L. Tushman, "Exploration, Exploitation, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited," Academy of Management Review, 28 (2003): 238-256.
54. Richard J. Hackman, "On the Coming Demise of Job Enrichment," in E.L. Cass and F.G. Zimmer, eds., Man and Work in Society (New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975), pp. 97-115.
55. Michael A. Hitt and R. Duane Ireland, "Peters and Waterman Revisited: The Unended Quest for Excellence," Academy of Management Executive, 1 (1987): 91-98.
56. See, for example, Billie Jo Zirger and Modesto A. Maidique, "A Model of New Product Development: An Empirical Test," Management Science, 36 (1990): 867-884;
57. for a review of much of this literature, see Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, "Product Development: Past Research, Present Findings, and Future Directions," Academy of Management Review, 20 (1995): 343-378.
58. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (New York, NY: Crowell, 1979), p. 112. (Originally published in 1911.)
59. Baruch Fischhoff, "For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Heuristics and Biases in Hind-sight," in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.335-353.
60. Barry M. Staw, "Attribution of the 'Causes' of Performance: An Alternative Interpretation of Cross-Sectional Research on Organizations," Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13 (1975): 414-432.
61. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 4th ed. (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2001).
62. D. T. Miller, "The Norm of Self-interest," American Psychologist, 54 (1999): 1053-1060.
63. B. Frank and G.G. Schulze, "Does Economics Make Citizens Corrupt?" Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 43 (2000): 101-113;
64. H. Frank, T.D. Gilovich, and D.T. Regan, "Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1993): 159-171.
65. This research is summarized in Robert M. Hauser, "What If We Ended Social Promotion?" Education Week, April 7, 1999, pp. 64-66.
66. Robert M. Hauser, "What If We Ended Social Promotion?" Education Week, 1999, pp. 64-66, Ibid.
67. Sheryl McCarthy, "Schools Repeat Social Promotion Problems," Newsday, March 28, 2002.
68. See John A. Meacham, "The Loss of Wisdom," in Robert J. Stemberg, ed., Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 181-211;
69. John A. Meacham, "Wisdom and the Context of Knowledge: Knowing What One Doesn't Know One Doesn't Know," in D. Huhn and J. A. Meacham, eds., On the Development of Developmental Psychology (Basel, Switzerland: Krager, 1983), 111-134;
70. see Robert J. Sternberg, "Implicit Theories of Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49 (1985): 607-627.
71. Gabrielle Bauer, "A Reluctant Policy Wonk: Dr. David Sackett, a Pioneer in Evidence-Based Medicine, Has No Time to Play King, but the World Seems Intent on Crowning Him," The Medical Post, August 22, 2002.