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Much of our business thinking is shaped by delusions errors of logic and flawed judgments that distort our understanding of the real reasons for a companys performance. In a brilliant and unconventional book, Phil Rosenzweig unmasks the delusions that are commonly found in the corporate world. These delusions affect the business press and academic research, as well as many bestselling books that promise to reveal the secrets of success or the path to greatness. Such books claim to be based on rigorous thinking, but operate mainly at the level of storytelling. They provide comfort and inspiration, but deceive managers about the true nature of business success. The most pervasive delusion is the Halo Effect. When a companys sales and profits are up, people often conclude that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary leader, capable employees, and a superb corporate culture. When performance falters, they conclude that the strategy was wrong, the leader became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture was stagnant. In fact, little may have changed company performance creates a Halo that shapes the way we perceive strategy, leadership, people, culture, and more. Drawing on examples from leading companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, Nokia, and ABB, Rosenzweig shows how the Halo Effect is widespread, undermining the usefulness of business bestsellers from In Search of Excellence to Built to Last and Good to Great.
[...]... greater profits, and ever larger returns for shareholders They naturally search for ready-made answers, for tidy plugand-play solutions that might give them a leg up on their rivals And the people who write business books — consultants and business school professors and strategy gurus — are happy to oblige Demand stimulates supply, and supply finds a ready demand Around and around we go But there’s more... recent bestsellers But that takes us only so far Once we’ve cleared away the delusions that permeate so much popular thinking about business, what then? The second thing a wise manager must do is focus on the elements that drive company performance while recognizing the fundamental uncertainty at the heart of the business world The remainder of the book, chapters 9 and 10, takes up these questions, suggesting... nothing to do with the pleasures of travel, but only with the efficiency of travel for learning They don’t seem to hear my explanation; they remain outraged They point out that I seem to be traveling all the time Why shouldn’t other people travel too? After they simmer down enough to understand the theorem, they still attack it It takes a long time to calm their passion with reason — and usually it isn’t... about the way we ask the question, or the way we go about trying to find answers, that keeps us from getting it right? The central idea in this book is that our thinking about business is shaped by a number of delusions There are good precedents for investigating delusions in business and economics Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, chronicled the. .. presumably understand the toy industry better than you and I do Ted Williams, the great Red Sox outfielder, once said there was one thing he always found irritating: With runners on base and the opposing team’s slugger coming to the plate, the manager walks to the mound and says to the pitcher, “Don’t give the batter a good pitch, but don’t walk him,” then turns around and marches back to the dugout Pointless!... about the business world, which takes place not in a laboratory, but in the messy and complex world around us? Do business questions lend themselves to scientific investigation? Can we devise alternative hypotheses and test them with carefully designed experiments, so that we can support some explanations and reject others? In many instances, the answer is yes Plenty of business questions lend themselves... bubbles and more More recently, cognitive psychologists have identified biases that affect the way individuals make decisions under uncertainty This book is about a different set of delusions, the ones that distort our understanding of company performance, that make it difficult to know why one company succeeds and another fails These errors of thinking pervade much that we read about business, whether... business will never be understood with the precision of the natural sciences, it’s best understood as a sort of humanity, a realm where the logic of scientific inquiry doesn’t apply Well, yes and no It may be true that business cannot be studied with the rigor of chemistry or geology, but that doesn’t mean that all we have is intuition and gut feel There’s no need to veer from one extreme to the other. .. claim to have the authority of science, but they miss the real rigor and logic of science They’re better described as pseudoscience Richard Feynman had an even more memorable phrase: Cargo Cult Science Here’s the way Feynman described it: In the South Seas there is a cult of people During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now So they’ve arranged... advantage?” And the answer? “Think about it deductively,” they urged If Cisco was more successful than other companies, that must mean it “has been more adept than its competitors at providing customers with the technology and equipment they want.” And that meant two things: Cisco had the strong belief in having no technology religion, and listening carefully to the customer.” According to O’Reilly and Pfeffer, . Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenzweig, Philip M., 1955– The halo effect and the eight other business delusions that deceive managers / Phil Rosenzweig. p. cm. Includes bibliographical. — Philosophy. 2. Business enterprises — Public opinion.3. Fallacies (Logic) 4. Success in business. I. Title. HD30.19.R67 2007 658 — dc22 2006049010 ISBN-13: 97 8-1 -4 16 5-3 85 8-5 ISBN-10: 1-4 16 5-3 85 8-5 Lyrics. profits, and ever larger returns for shareholders. They naturally search for ready-made answers, for tidy plug- and- play solutions that might give them a leg up on their rivals. And the people