Professor
and Organizational Psychologist Rob Briner from the University of London (Pictured to the left) has a
great interview in People Management this month called "Tried
and Attested." He is an articulate and compelling guy;
take this quote:
"Management fads are attractive, as they promise to deliver a lot and do
it fast. The alternative approach of a careful, sober, systematic consideration
of the problem, potential solutions and the evidence can seem, in contrast,
both boring and too slow. From the snake-oil salesman or quack to sub-prime
loans and fad diets, we show a strong preference for the quick fix. On the
other hand, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. Empowerment,
TQM, excellence, downsizing, emotional intelligence, business process
re-engineering and, my current personal favourite, talent management, are just
some of the fads that have been rapidly adopted and, as many observers have
argued, probably done more harm than good. Fads and fashions are also confusing
to managers because they offer completely contradictory advice."
He is singing my tune. I believe strongly in creativity and experimenting
with new ideas, but I get very skeptical when someone claims that some new idea
– or even an old one – will solve all your organization’s problems. And I am especially skeptical of breakthrough
ideas. One of the most interesting parts of writing Hard
Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense with Jeff Pfeffer (which
took about five years) was our long and unsuccessful search for breakthrough
management ideas. The best summary of why people claim to have breakthrough business ideas probably came from Stanford Professor
Emeritus James March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist).
When I wrote him and asked if he could think of any breakthrough management
ideas, he wrote back that “most claims of originality are
testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.”
Indeed, it is interesting that one management book after another seems claims
to have a breakthrough idea, while one Nobel Prize winner after another (we
read a lot of their acceptance speeches when working on the book) is careful to show that his or her ideas are simply a careful extension of prior work completed by others.
The comment from March (plus my
unfortunate experience in academia and business where mediocre scholars and
business gurus are constantly claiming that they deserve credit for ideas
that have been around for decades) led me to propose Sutton’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.”
P.S. We’ve got more of Rob’s work posted at www.evidence-basedmanagement.com, including a quiz to help determine "how evidence-based are you?"
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