Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management [Hardcover]

Named one of the "Highlights from the Decade" in "strategy+business" magazine.

The best organisations 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 organisational health.

This practical and candid book challenges leaders to commit to evidence-based management as a way of organisational life – and shows how to finally turn this common sense into common practice.

What was the impetus for Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total
Nonsense?
People kept telling us about the wonderful things they were doing to
implement knowledge--but those things often clashed with what we knew about
organizations and people. Upon probing, we discovered that many managers
had been prompted by a seminar, book, or consultant to do things that were
at odds with the best evidence about what works. We became fascinated with
why the market for business knowledge was making it harder rather than
easier to be an effective manager and what could be done about it. We also
became fascinated with certain half-truths that we kept hearing again and
again--ideas and principles that are partly right at times, but are flawed
and misleading often enough to get organizations into serious trouble.

What is evidence-based management?
Evidence-based management can change how every manager thinks and acts. It
is a way of seeing the world and thinking about the craft of management.
The main idea is that using better, deeper logic and employing facts
enables leaders to do their jobs better. Evidence-based management entails
facing the hard facts about what works and what doesn't, understanding the
dangerous half-truths that constitute so much conventional wisdom about
management, and rejecting the total nonsense that too often passes for
sound advice. This requires a mind-set with two critical components: first,
a willingness to put aside belief and conventional wisdom and instead hear
and act on the facts; second, an unrelenting commitment to gather facts and
information necessary to make more informed and intelligent decisions, and
to keep pace with new evidence and use the new facts to update practices.

In the book, you strongly object to the mindset that the best companies
have the best people. Why?
The talent mindset is rooted in assumptions and empirical evidence that are
incomplete, misleading, and downright wrong. Performance naturally varies
over time, and human judgments are clouded by invariable, potent, and
largely inescapable psychological biases. These human frailties mean that
for most jobs in most organizations, assessing talent and ability is
fraught with error. Talent depends on a person's motivation and experience;
it depends on how a person is managed or led. And it also depends on what
happens to people, how they are coached, and most important, whether they
work in a weak or a strong system--not just their innate skill. NASA had
some of the smartest people in the world at the time of the Challenger
disaster. Nearly all had been replaced with equally intelligent people by
the time the Columbia disaster happened. As the report by the Columbia
Commission shows, NASA's system was largely unchanged, and it made both
these groups of really smart people do really dumb things. Winning the war
for talent is useless if your organization is badly designed, led, and uses
"best practices" that are actually pretty bad.

You also challenge the prevalent belief that it's better for employees to
keep work separate from the rest of life. How will breaking this barrier
help organizations?
We are not advocating that companies should let employees do whatever they
want. What we are suggesting is that companies devote less effort to
batting down who people really are and what matters to them, and more time
to using their people's gifts, skills, and distinct charms to benefit both
the company and their people. Research on creative organizations provides
especially strong support for this conclusion. Creativity happens when
people draw on what they know and who they are to say what they really
think, rather than pretend to be stifled clones of each other.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.