Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Library Catalogs: Articles, Books, Databases, etc.: Jackson Library: Stanford GSB

Featured Faculty Books: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior; Spence Faculty Fellow for 2006-07
Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Organizational Behavior (by courtesy), Graduate School of Business; Professor of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering; Codirector of the Customer-Focused Innovation Executive Program

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management
by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. Harvard Business School Press, 2006

• The three most harmful ways of making decisions
• A conversation with the authors
• Visit Pfeffer & Sutton's Evidence-Based Management site

Great leaders are in control and ought to be.
The best organizations have the best people.
Financial incentives drive company performance.

Great pearls of business wisdom? Absolutely not, state Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. They say too much common management "wisdom" isn't wise at all, but instead is based on flawed knowledge of best practices that are poor, incomplete, or outright wrong--not to mention hazardous to an organization's health.

In Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Business School Press; $27.50; March 2006), Pfeffer and Sutton show how companies can bolster performance and trump the competition through evidence-based management, an approach to decision-making and action that is driven by hard facts rather than half-truths or hype.

Unfortunately, managers often base their actions not on evidence or deep knowledge, but on blind faith--mindlessly copying what others have done, letting too much ride on gut instinct or intuition, and acting without questioning the myths, beliefs, ideologies, and popular fashions of management practices. Pfeffer and Sutton say enough is enough--and advocate the use of evidence-based management. In addition to outlining its financial and organizational impact on business, the authors help leaders to overcome barriers to evidence-based management in their own organizations, emphasizing how to manage in light of the most dangerous half-truths that bedevil organizations, which include:

Work is fundamentally different than the rest of life
The best organizations have the best people
Financial incentives drive company performance
Strategy is destiny
Change or die
Great leaders are in control of their companies

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense is a candid book that challenges executives to commit to evidence-based management as a way of organizational life. And it shows executives how to turn this commonsense approach into common practice.

About the Authors:

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1979. He is the author or co-author of ten books including: Managing with Power, Competitive Advantage Through People, The Human Equation, The Knowing-Doing Gap and Hidden Value. He has also published more than 110 articles and book chapters.

-J. Pfeffer (left) and R.I. Sutton

Pfeffer has served on the faculties of the business schools at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley. During the 1981-1982 academic year, he was the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He currently serves on the board of directors of several companies. Pfeffer writes a monthly management column called "The Human Factor" for Business 2.0, a leading business magazine. He is a member and Fellow of the Academy of Management and a member of the Industrial Relations Research Association and has won the Richard D. Irwin award for Scholarly Contributions to Management as well as several awards for books and articles.
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Robert I. Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, a cofounder of the new Hasso Platner Institute of Design at Stanford, and an IDEO Fellow.

Sutton has taught at the Haas Business School and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His honors include the award for the best paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, induction into the Academy of Management Journal's Hall of Fame, the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching, the McGraw-Hill Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award, the McCullough Faculty Scholar Chair from Stanford, and selection by Business 2.0 as a leading "management guru" in 2002.

Sutton has published over 100 articles and chapters in scholarly and applied publications, and has published seven books and edited volumes. He is co-author of The Knowing-Doing Gap and his most recent book is Weird Ideas That Work, which was selected by the Harvard Business Review as one of the best ten business books of the year.
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