NEW BOOK
“Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management,” by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, Harvard Business School Press, $27.50.
The workplace version of Consumer Reports, it evaluates virtually every aspect of managing a business against old and new thinking and buzz. The authors’ message: Practices marketed by books and articles aren’t empirical evidence in the truest sense. They often show success from a relatively narrow view (case studies of companies where it worked) but ignore the flip side–companies that tried implementation and failed. The authors challenge management to think about what will work for their firm, rather than adopt “flavor of the day.”
Evidence-based management puts logic at the forefront of data-gathering and decision-making processes. Some things you’ll learn from evidence-based management:
– Treat old ideas as old ideas. Old excellence may be preferable to new failure. This peacefully coexists with “change or die” thinking because most innovations spring from tweaking what was working, not from developing a “silver bullet.”
– Obsession with individual “talent” can be hazardous to organizational health. There’s no denying that the best talent delivers the best performance. That said, it’s easy to test for intelligence; it’s difficult to test for wisdom.
NEW BOOK
“Perfect Phrases for Executive Presentations,” by Alan Perlman, McGraw-Hill, $9.95.
Many of Perlman’s phrases are “plug and play,” others are thought-starters that you adapt to your situation.
The section about keeping the audience involved through interactive language is particularly good. Using rhetorical questions and Q&A techniques throughout a speech makes it conversational.
One Q&A technique is to give the answer yourself. You can also call for an audience response, asking for a voice vote or a show of hands. You can also call for a silent response by saying: “Do you want be involved in…?” Sentence-ending conversational tags like “wouldn’t you” and “haven’t you” build the speaker-audience bridge too.
