Evidence demands a verdict
Do the best organizations have the best people? Is work fundamentally different than the rest of life? Do financial incentives drive company performance? Are great leaders in control of their companies? Must a company or group change or die? Are common processes or key change frameworks - Lean, TQM, or CMMI, to name a few - the secret to organizational successes?
Popular ideas like these drive business decisions every day. Yet far too frequently, common management 'wisdom' isn't so wise. Too often, it's flawed knowledge based on best practices that are actually poor, incomplete, or outright obsolete. The situation can be made far more serious, however, when, hordes of managers are chartered (and mandated) to use this dubious knowledge to make decisions that can be hazardous to any organization's health.
The authors of this Harvard Business School book are both in Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The central theme of their book is common sense - decisions and actions ought to be fact based and result from logical analyses (which they describe as 'Evidenced Based Management', or EBM), rather than 'me-too' copying. The authors show how EBM is not all that common - managers who stop and think about what they are doing are far too rare, yet are usually successful.
The authors do a great job at analyzing existing managerial practices, and suggest nine implementation principles to help people and companies that are committed to doing what it takes to profit from evidence based management:
- Power, prestige and performance make you stubborn, stupid and resistant to valid evidence
- Evidence based management is not just for senior executives
- Like everything else, you still need to sell it
- See yourself and your organisation as outsiders do
- Treat your organisation as unfinished prototype
- No brags. Just facts
- Master the obvious and mundane
- If all else fails, slow the spread of bad practices
- The best diagnostic question: What happens when people fail?
