Product Description

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.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6760 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 276 pages

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

Chicago Tribune, April 24, 2006
"The workplace version of Consumer Reports, it evaluates virtually every aspect of managing a business against old and new thinking"

The Observer, Simon Caulkin, March 12, 2006
"Every potential manager should be made to read it before they are allowed to be in charge of anything."

Customer Reviews

Another thought provoking work from Pfeffer


I've been an avid Pfeffer fan since 'Resource Dependency', so am inclined to give him 5 stars for anything he writes.

The main themes in here are extremely thought provoking and are great for jogging one's brain to think thorough one's management assumptions. A few of his analogies are weak...I believe there are better cases as analogies for some of Pfeffer's points. He relies upon his corporate experience, but most of the half-truths have graphic examples in government bureaucracies. Using those types of examples would have made the book more alive.

I bought this when it first came out and just reread this weekend. It's the type of book I share with my staff to start the conversation about our approach to work. Very useful tool in that regard.

Great scientific evaluation of many management beliefs
This is one of the best books on management, which takes a hard scientific look at deeply ingrained beliefs and provides scientific pointers, in many cases to the gold standard--controlled experiments.

As with any book, each of us loves evidence that supports our own beliefs, but this book provides strong evidence that made me re-evaluate some other deeply ingrained (and likely wrong) beliefs, and that's the real value of the book.

Unlike In Search of Excellence, which was highly motivating, but weak on causal data (most evidence was correlational), this one is full of great pointers to solid evidence and controlled experiments.

To keep the balance in this review, I'll mention one gripe. In multiple cases the authors have fallen into the trap of pointing to anecdotal evidence and single examples of "success" to support their claim, thus failing to pass the bar of scientific-based evaluations. These are few, and most evaluations are very solid, hence the 5 stars.

Read it, and re-evaluate some of our own misconceptions!

Rigorous Research Put Into Practice
Pfeffer and Sutton cover a lot of important territory in this book. I learned lots of useful lessons about managing people, incentives, organizational change, leadership, and a host of other HR fundamentals. But the main lesson that I took away from the book is to be wary of excessive claims by people who claim to have great experience and expertise, and lots of success stories, but don't know or reject the findings from the best research. As Pfeffer and Sutton point out, one of the biggest problem with management methods and advice is that the people who sell them have a financial incentive to make claims that that their ideas are effective even when the best evidence clashes with their advice. And because of the well-documented human tendency to "see what you believe," people - including managers and doctors too - will go on using and recommending suspect practices throughout their careers while firmly believing that the evidence is on their side, even though it is not. This isn't a fast or light read, but it is an important wake-up call for management.