Customer Reviews

What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management

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Jeffery Pfeffer takes the material in is recurring column in Business 2.0 and expands them into short vignettes on management and leadership topics. Normally, this approach does not work as either the book becomes a trite reiteration of previous material or the ideas that were good for a column are not robust enough for treatment in a book. Pfeffer does a superb job avoiding both as each chapter/thought is concise fully developed and warrants a couple of page treatment. A summary of each section and chapter highlights is at the end of this review. This book has the consideration and wisdom to be the true direct support managers need for managing their people, business plans, and ad hoc situations.

Pfeffer's focused and comprehensive treatment provides wisdom that every manager should have access to and frequently reference. I would suggest that executives and managers use this book as a cost effective tool for management development by followng three steps:

First, I would have every manager read the book now.

Second I would make it part of your planning process by requiring managers to re-read the book prior to doing their plans and budgets for 2008.

Finally, I would make sure the book is used in executive and corporate governance processes when many of the suboptimal decisions Pfeffer discusses get made. In that way executives will be informed and make a business decision rather than one that 'makes the numbers work'.

The book is good, but there are a few weak spots. Pfeffer is a world renowned organizational design and Human Capital expert and this shows in the book. The book can be a little people heavy to the exclusion of other considerations such as strategic, market, financial etc. Pfeffer raises issues of corporatepolicy issues that are often outside the power of individual managers to change. Pfeffer addresses this issue in Chapter 20 - No more excuses so I would recommend reading chapter 20 first or at least right after the first section of the book.

Overall the book contains wisdom that every manager needs because so often we become `autistic' in business, by that I mean that we look at employees as things rather than people. This book is valuable to every manager and executive and will them keep things in balance and be a better manager.

The book is divided into the following parts and I have highlighted a few of the best chapters.

Part One People-Centered Strategies concentrates on issues related to insights into how the organization works with its people. Specific topics include:

Chapter 2 People as the face of your business -- a clear statement of the obvious but overlooked truth that people are central to the business

Chapter 3 Making companies work like communities provides human view on the issue of culture, not as an abstract concept but as the human interactions inside the company that make it tick

Chapter 5 How companies get smarter through taking chances and making mistakes providing a definition of the power of a fault-tolerant company. It reminds me that the most valuable employee is the one who has just learned from a mistake

Part Two Creating Effective Workplace provides a practicable advice on how to manage core workplace issues.

Chapter 8 Let workers work -- discusses the real but not recognized corporate impact of the trend to have employee directed benefits and programs.

Chapter 9 Why Spy on Your Employees addresses the challenging issue of monitoring employee work activities in an interconnected world.

Chapter 10 All work and no play is of particular interest as it highlights the difference between activities (I work long and hard) and results. Too many people confuse the two to the detriment of the company and themselves.

Chapter 13 Resumes don't tell covers the issue of talent selection and the information you need to get the best people.

Part Three Power Plays discusses the role of the senior executive and paths to gaining that role.

Chapter 14 The Courage to Rise Above is perhaps the most important chapter in the book for the individual manager as it contains some hard to hear, but must be heard advice on developing and advancing your career and the career of others. The wisdom in this section is tough but very valuable.

Chapter 15 Executive in Chief highlights the importance and power of leading through a process of framing, measurement and communication that everyone can use. Some leaders lead by force of will, this is a process for leading that creates leadership capability rather than demands political capital.

Chapter 20 No excuses discusses the prevalent topic of executives and managers concentrating on how things will not work, rather than how they could work. This chapter works well with the earlier chapter on persistent. No Excuses should be mandatory reading and review whenever someone says that "we can't" or we can when pigs become aerodynamically sound.

Part Four Measures of Success discusses issues of measurement and performance management. The chapters here are pretty self explanatory, solid and include

Chapter 23 Dare to be different - discussion of the evils of benchmarking

Chapter 25 Don't' believe the hype about strategy - something every manager and executive who has written a check for consultants to ghost write their strategy should read.

Part Five Facing the Nation discuses the policy implications of management and human performance issues. This section addresses issues regarding unions, executive pay and corporate responsibility.

According to Jeffrey Pfeffer, there seem to be three themes that unify many of the ideas he shares in this volume: "(1) the importance of considering feedback effects - the ideas that actions often have unintended consequences; (2) the naïve, overly simplistic, almost mechanical models of people and organizations that seem to dominant both discourse and practice; and (3) the tendency to overcomplicate what are often reasonably straightforward choices and insights." Pfeffer provides an abundance of examples of these and other especially common errors of comprehension and, worse yet, errors of judgment.

"The message...is that we ought to think before we act, taking into full account feedback effects and using the insights of not only the large body of evidence on behavior but our own common sense and observations. It turns out both common sense and careful thought are in short supply. But that means there are great opportunities for those people and organizations willing to spend the effort to get beyond conventional management wisdom."

In one of his previous books (Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense), Pfeffer and his co-author, Robert I. Sutton, examine what they call "the doing-knowing gap": doing without knowing, or at least without knowing enough. "People kept telling us about the wonderful things they were doing to implement knowledge - but those things clashed with, and at times were the opposite of, what we knew about organizations and people. Upon probing, we soon discovered that many managers had been prompted by a seminar, book, or consultants to do things that were at odds with the best evidence about what works." Pfeffer and Sutton identify some of the barriers to what they call "evidence-based management" and recommend specific steps that leaders can take to overcome those barriers.

Whenever I read one of Pfeffer's books, I am reminded of Ernest Hemingway's observation that every great writer has "a built-in, shock-proof crap detector." For years, Pfeffer has challenged conventional management wisdom that is not supported by sufficient evidence. Consider this composite quotation from Chapter 25, "Don't Believe the Hype About Strategy," throughout which Pfeffer explains what is wrong with strategy as it has come to be known and defined:

"First of all, there is often much too much emphasis on the quality of the presentation and the pitch rather than the quality and business acumen of the ideas...Second, there is often a lot of emphasis on talk - on sounding smart - in the strategy formulation process and a lot of time sitting around thinking and planning instead of going out and trying some stuff, seeing what works, and learning by doing...[Despite] all the emphasis on strategy at the board and senior executive level, there is precious little evidence that it really is a source of success. The research on the effects of strategic planning generally finds it has no effect on corporate performance...[In fact] most successful strategies are simple...What is extremely difficult to copy - and what therefore does provide competitive advantage - is the way a company implements and executes its strategy...The other problem with today's overemphasis on strategy is the tendency to build in various forms of rigidity. Strategy, after all, is designed to tell a company not only what to do but what not to do - what customers and products and industry segments to avoid, either because they don't play to the company's strengths or aren't economically attractive. Or some combination of the two...[Therefore] develop your strategy adaptively, by using your company's best thinking at the time, learning from experience, and then trying again, using what you have learned. Building an experimenting, mistake-forgiving, adaptive culture provides a competitive advantage that lasts, because that sort of environment is much more difficult to copy than some dogmatic strategy. Under almost all circumstances, fast learners are going to outperform even the most brilliant strategists who can't adapt."

This composite quotation is representative of the thrust and flavor of Pfeffer's analytical and writing skills throughout the entire book as he offers unconventional management wisdom on a full-range of subjects. In addition to his thoughts about what's wrong with strategy, I also appreciated his contrarian opinions about building customer relationships, training expenditures, "taking chances and making mistakes," working long hours, interview objectives and hiring practices, "persistence," compensation incentives and rewards, and organized labor (i.e. unions). Ultimately, Pfeffer insists, decision-makers must follow a remarkably simple process that dates back at least to Aristotle:

1. What is the question or problem?
2. What are the possible answers or solutions?
3. What is the best one and how do we know that?
4. What must we now do?

Of course, mistakes are made when making decisions and/or when following through on them but at least it is possible to increase the percentage of correct decisions. I agree with Pfeffer on the importance of considering feedback effects because actions often have unintended consequences. I also share his disdain for "the naïve, overly simplistic, almost mechanical models of people and organizations that seem to dominant both discourse and practice." As for overcomplicating what are often reasonably straightforward choices and insights, Albert Einstein offers the best advice: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Jeffrey Pfeffer is an exceptional management author, who has written twelve great books, among which The Knowing-Doing Gap, Hidden Value, The Human Equation, and Hard Facts. This book, What Were They Thinking, is based on a series of columns Pfeffer wrote for the magazine Business 2.0. In it, he covers a wide range of topics, from people centered management strategies to creating effective workplaces, using power strategies, thinking differently about success, executive pay and corporate ethics. The great thing in all Pfeffers writing is that whatever he says is so well argued and facts-based. If you're familiar with his earlier books, you will surely recognize many of the points he's making in this book. At the same time, however, there is a certain freshness in this book, maybe due to the fact that it is based on columns. Another reason is there are new examples from the corporate world, and there are many new research references. Friend and colleague of Pfeffer, Bob Sutton, has said this about him: "And no matter how strongly you disagree with him, he has this annoying habit of basing his arguments on the best theory and evidence in peer-reviewed academic publications. Plus when he writes about an unstudied topic, his logic is often so compelling that refuting his arguments is extremely difficult." When reading this book (and practically anything else he has written) you'll find it easy to agree with Sutton: it is very hard to disagree with Pfeffer once you follow his reasoning and evidence. Some of the chapters I liked best in this book were: The courage to rise above, Dare to be different, More mister Nice guy, Curbing the Urge to Merge, In praise of organized labor, Stopping corporate misdeeds. A great book. Every student of organizational effectiveness should read it.
Coert Visser

In the tradition of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense and The Knowing-Doing Gap, What Were They Thinking? is a great addition to the Jeffrey Pfeffer collection. Covering five important themes in the corporate world (People Centered Strategies, Creating Effective Workplaces, Leadership and Influence, Organizational Strategy, and Public Policy), Pfeffer gives us plenty to chew on. Since each chapter stands alone, the book can be read in the order of interest or need.

If you'd rather carefully think through an issue than simply respond based on what you've always done before (or the textbook solution), you'll enjoy the thoughtful approach that you find here. In wrestling through some of the today's most pressing issues, Pfeffer offers the kind of thinking that sets him apart from most other writers in the management genre. Regardless of your arena, this will be a valuable addition to your reading list.

MTW, a software company serving the insurance industry, pushed employee turnover from 30 percent (standard for their niche) to an amazing four percent. Like many innovative companies that pay attention to their corporate culture, they understand that compensation--alone--is not the big deal in attracting and retaining quality people. For example, MTW awards "Road Warrior" points to their traveling executives and often showers gifts on families of road warriors--thanking them for their sacrifices back home.

This is just one of dozens of nuggets in Pfeffer's fast-reading book. No wonder Jim Collins describes him as "one of the sparkling gems in the field of management."

Pfeffer packs a punch in each of his 28 short chapters. He applauds "noisy complainers" who point out errors so the systemic problems will get fixed. He champions IDEO's belief that "failing early and failing often is better than failing once, failing at the end, and failing big." He writes, "The principle is simple--learn and fail on a small scale."

Pfeffer's chapter on New York's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will rattle your notion of leadership: there's no leader, nor conductor! And you'll reach for the Maalox when you read that "most people bring only about 20 percent of their talent and energy to their jobs." Buy the book. He has some ideas for all of us.

Continuing a campaign to induce more common sense thinking into business management, Stanford Business School Professor and well-published author(12 books at last count) Jeffery Pfeffer utilizes materials from his Business 2.0 "The Human Factor" columns to tell us that common sense is not all that common. Or, at the very least to demonstrate that business leadership may not always consider the consequences of their actions and/or they hold inaccurate or incomplete views of human behavior. Touching on subjects from the problems with resume based hiring (looks backward, not forward), to budget based performance evaluations (ignores competitive standards), and strategy by PowerPoint (values planning over doing), Pfeffer presents arguments designed to make the reader think differently about many of the topics faced by businesses today.

Although the title may contain a bit of marketing hype - the wisdom describe in some chapters is not all that unconventional; spend more on training, take chances and make mistakes, build trust in the workplace - it is wisdom worth considering, none-the-less. I particularly liked Chapter 11, on financial incentive schemes, where Professor Pfeffer references, "... the "extrinsic incentives bias," a belief that others are motivated primarily by money even if people know that they, themselves, are not." In this chapter he notes that this bias and the comparative ease of implementing reward and incentive schemes often make this the tool of choice when a business is faced with the need for performance improvement; even though, financial incentives often have undesired consequences and provide no competitive advantage as they are easily copied by competitors. These bits of wisdom, and others like it, make this easy read a recommended selection for managers and OD professionals alike. Dennis DeWilde, author of The Performance Connection.

The book is maybe not as unconventional as the (American-style) title wants to make you think, but nevertheless good. It will give you some insight, but also some examples to use in your business life to convince people that the "silver bullets" dont work. Can be handy. Also, there's a lot fo organisational psychology language and ideas and it's worth the money. recommended.

All good information, and an interesting read. The concepts presented are not unlike many Marketing/Innovation books, but the author presents a good case. Every manager/exec should put these principles into practice...but they have probably already read a book that says the same thing!

Jeffery Pfeffer takes the material in is recurring column in Business 2.0 and expands them into short vignettes on management and leadership topics.

This is required reading for a class I am taking this Fall (MBA). I started reading it and found it engrossing. I ended up reading it in a day, though I will go back and read it again after my class starts. There are some common themes (loyal and highly skilled employees = loyal customers) but much of the book really challenges the common wisdom about so many things. For example, the negative effects of cafeteria style benefits. I would never have thought about that but I suspect his conclusions are spot on. This is particulary timely in our U.S. federal budget debate/mess. We are slashing spending at the state and local level. This looks to be a good thing on the surface, and has some positive aspects, but it likely will have negative effects as to our ability to develop and educate our young people for the jobs of tomorrow.