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Untested Beliefs and Half Truths Pass as Management Gospel

March 2006

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail, argue Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty members Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in their new book.

Their just-released book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), identifies and dissects the poor decision practices based on ingrained, untested beliefs and half-truths that masquerade as sound advice. Pfeffer and Sutton then argue their case for evidence-based management.

Working managers and executives must do their jobs in the face of incomplete information, relentless demands for decisions, constant criticism, and second-guessing from people both inside and outside their companies. However, they write: "We believe that managers are seduced by far too many half-truths: ideas that are partly right but also partly wrong and that damage careers and companies over and over again. Yet managers routinely ignore or reject solid evidence that these truisms are flawed."

Some specific half truths: The best organizations have the best people; financial incentives drive company performance; change or die; great leaders are in control of their companies.

Instead of following half truths, Pfeffer and Sutton endorse principles such as: Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype; see yourself and your organization as outsiders do; power, prestige, and performance make you stubborn, stupid, and resistant to valid evidence; evidence-based management is not just for senior executives; and ask the best diagnostic question: What happens when people fail?

Underlying the book are the authors' two fundamental laws:

  • "Instead of being interested in what is new, we ought to be interested in what is true." (Pfeffer's Law)
  • "If you think that you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone probably already had it. This idea isn't original either; I stole it from someone else." (Sutton's Law)

Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Sutton is professor of organizational behavior, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of management science and engineering at Stanford School of Engineering. They are also co-authors of The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

Video File, Interview with Pfeffer and Sutton, 16:32 minutes

Navigating the Half-Truths of Leadership
Stanford Business magazine, May 2006 Details