Payday Cash Loan

Author: Phil Rosenzweig

Publication Date: 2007

The most popular and inspiring books on business success, like “Good to Great,” “Authentic Leadership,” and “In Search of Excellence,” are based on faulty research and conclusions, says Phil Rosenzweig, formerly on the faculty of Harvard Business School and now a professor at IMD in Lausanne. He says the flawed thinking behind such books leads to delusions that won’t help managers succeed.

Rosenzweig says such books, though they stand on mountains of research, are based on biased data and unscientific analysis. They perpetuate the idea, according to Rosenzweig, that just a few factors, usually vague things like “culture” and “leadership,” will give you the keys to business success.

You probably remember a couple of rules that these best sellers can violate: correlation does not equal causation, inspecting a “sample” consisting only of good parts will not yield good information about a process, and anecdotal evidence is interesting but not acceptable as proof of a hypothesis. Yet even people with science-based engineering backgrounds fall for the arguments in these books.

So what are the eight delusions?