Reuters correspondent Helen Chernikoff takes note of Phil Rosenzweig’s new management guide, The Halo Effect… and Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, in which the biz school prof comes out swinging:
“Some of the biggest business blockbusters of recent years contain not one or two, but several delusions. They operate mainly at the level of storytelling.”
Among the books he labels as hampered by the halo effect (“a tendency to base specific conclusions on general impressions”) are recongized genre touchstones like In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, and Good to Great—to which the authors, if they bother to reply, say, well, we never said we had the perfect solution. What advice does Rosenzweig offer to counter their delusory storytelling? Chernikoff summarizes his message: “Strategy and execution are risky, he writes. Luck plays a role. Strong decisions can generate bad outcomes.” People will pay $25 just to be told life’s a crapshoot? Damn; clearly I’m in the wrong racket.
Rosenzweig responds to the review on his blog, at least the parts where Chernikoff got feedback from the writers he criticized. He notes that In Search of Excellence never really claimed to be more than a bunch of interesting stories, but that the other two books quite explicitly purport to explain why some companies succeed and others don’t, even though their content “does not remotely meet the most basic test of good research.” Neither Good to Great nor Built to Last is a bad book, Rosenzweig stresses, but “a good story is a long way from a claim of solid research or scientific rigor.”