This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap

Management fads tend to come from people who did well in school. Many of these are  business school professors and consultants, who've never operated a business. They are often people who’ve never failed, been told that they’re smart all their lives and expect others to be impressed by their ideas, not to examine them thoroughly. They tend come up with their ideas by talking to other smart, successful people about their experiences. These ideas get picked up by more smart, successful people and are propagated further. The elite hivemind then puts these ideas into practice, rarely checking what evidence the ideas are based on. When the ideas fail, they are rarely questioned. Shortcomings are blamed on poor execution by less smart, successful people. We need to own up to some basic truths. Case study research can be useful, but is enormously flawed and highly susceptible to bias. People recounting events usually tell self-serving accounts and researchers conducting interviews are often trying to confirm their own hunches. The  interviews themselves are almost never subjected to any serious review. We need to be more vigilant. We can do better. While it is true that researching organizations is notoriously difficult and that interviewing executives is often the best we can do, we can seek to corroborate findings from other fields, explore counternarratives and apply greater scrutiny. We can’t just go around believing everything we think. As Richard Feynman put it “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.  So you have to be very careful about that.” The post This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap first appeared on Digital Tonto. Related posts: Change Isn’t About Persuasion. It’s About Power Every Changemaker Should Know These 3 Strategies (But Most Don’t) To Overcome Resistance To Change, You Need A Strategy, Not A Slogan Change Is Always About Identity Ideas Can Only Be Validated Forward, Never Backward