Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Sutton, Robert I.  Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: Profiting from evidence-based management.  Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.  276 pages.  $29.95.  [ISBN: 1-59139-862-2]

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton use their backgrounds as business and organizational psychology professors to co-author a book on evidence-based management.  Already the authors of other well-received management books such as the "Knowing-Doing Gap", the pair wrote the book in order to understand why management-based decisions in the corporate world are often based on incorrect assumptions.  They argue for the use of fact-based decision making in management and discuss popular assumptions such as incentives improve performance and that talent is fixed.  In essence, the authors note that evidence-based management is the practice of changing power dynamics - replacing formal authority, reputation and intuition with data.

Throughout the book, Pfeffer and Sutton call out several management strategy fads that prove that techniques popularly touted do not always produce the results they claim.  They even note that some of the work completed by management experts ends up producing more of a benefit for the consultant than for the organization that hires them.  In some instances, the authors warn that damages can occur to relationship structure and to the organization, requiring precious time and financial resources to fix the issue.

The authors flesh out a leadership control cycle that displays their guidelines for leadership behavior and finish the book by listing nine implementation principles for succeeding in evidence-based management.  They include: treating your organization as an unfinished prototype, mastering the obvious and mundane, and seeing yourself and the organization as outsiders do.  They also promote the idea of actively misbehaving (i.e. - ignoring orders) in order to benefit the organization and prevent bad management policies.  They conclude by noting that a leader's job is to create a continuous learning environment that allows for people to actively question and think about the data in order to decide what really works.

This book is recommended for anyone interested in learning more about business management practices.  Although the book is centered on the corporate world, the book is relevant and applicable to a variety of fields, making it a source for anyone who desires a challenge to think differently about long-practiced management techniques.

Senovia Guevara
University of Michigan Library
Senovia_guevara@hotmail.com