The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (English Edition)

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		The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (English Edition)
		The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (English Edition)

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 company's 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 company's 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.

Rosenzweig identifies nine popular business delusions. Among them:

The Delusion of Absolute Performance: Company performance is relative to competition, not absolute, which is why following a formula can never guarantee results. Success comes from doing things better than rivals, which means that managers have to take risks.

The Delusion of Rigorous Research: Many bestselling authors praise themselves for the vast amount of data they have gathered, but forget that if the data aren't valid, it doesn't matter how much was gathered or how sophisticated the research methods appear to be. They trick the reader by substituting sizzle for substance.

The Delusion of Single Explanations: Many studies show that a particular factor, such as corporate culture or social responsibility or customer focus, leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

In what promises to be a landmark book, The Halo Effect replaces mistaken thinking with a sharper understanding of what drives business success and failure. The Halo Effect is a guide for the thinking manager, a way to detect errors in business research and to reach a clearer understanding of what drives business success and failure.

Skeptical, brilliant, iconoclastic, and mercifully free of business jargon, Rosenzweig's book is nevertheless dead serious, making his arguments about important issues in an unsparing and direct way that will appeal to a broad business audience. For managers who want to separate fact from fiction in the world of business, The Halo Effect is essential reading -- witty, often funny, and sharply argued, it's an antidote to so much of the conventional thinking that clutters business bookshelves.

网友对The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (English Edition)的评论

大赞此书和作者。标题无意贬低商业媒体记者，但近年来媒体，特别是商业媒体，的确有“善锦上添花、落井下石”之嫌。对于顺风顺水的企业，媒体能吹上天，经营不善，便事后诸葛亮，说“你看吧，早说什么呢”。
遗憾的是，作者也没能提出有效的战略。
p.s. professor Rosenzweig显然是对Jim Collins很不屑的！什么狗屁built to last, good to great，试图找出好企业的共同点，最后得出结论就好像是说：大部分英雄人物都有一个鼻子两只眼睛，所以要努力往那个方向长，就有可能成功。

挺好，应该是正品书籍

As best summarized by the author: "The central idea in this book is that our thinking about business is shaped by a number of delusions...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 in leading magazines or scholarly journals or management bestsellers. They cloud our ability to think clearly and critically about the nature of success in business."

The book then goes on to present the nine delusions excerpted below:

"Delusion One: The Halo Effect - The tendency to look at a company's overall performance and make attributions about its culture, leadership, values, and more. In fact, many things we commonly claim drive performance are simply attributions based on prior performance.

Delusion Two: The Delusion of Correlation and Causality - Two things may be correlated, but we may not know which one causes which. Does employee satisfaction lead to high performance? The evidence suggests it's mainly the other way around - company success has a stronger impact on employee satisfaction.

Delusion Three: The Delusion of Single Explanation - Many studies show that a particular factor - strong company culture of customer focus or great leadership - leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

Delusion Four: The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots - If we pick a number of successful companies and search for what they have in common, we'll never isolate the reasons for their success, because we have no way of comparing them with less successful companies.

Delusion Five: The Delusion of Rigorous Research - If the data aren't good quality, it doesn't matter how much we have gathered or how sophisticated our research methods appears to be.

Delusion Six: The Delusion of Lasting Success - Almost all high performing companies regress over time. The promise of a blueprint for lasting success is attractive but not realistic.

Delusion Seven: The Delusion of Absolute Performance - Company performance is relative, not absolute. A company can improve and fall further behind its rivals at the same time.

Delusion Eight: The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick - It may be true that successful companies often pursued a highly focused strategy, but that doesn't mean highly focused strategies often lead to success.

Delusion Nine: The Delusion of Organizational Physics - Company performance doesn't obey immutable laws of nature and can't be predicted with the accuracy of science - despite our desire for certainty and order."

Every now and then one comes across a book, that makes its reader take a step back and re-assess his views, experiences and readings. The Halo Effect is one of these books. It delivers both on account of the content and also of the numerous corporate examples and references to leading work in the leadership/management space to illustrate the concepts presented. A very refreshing and highly recommended read!

Below are excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- "In fact, for all the secrets and formulas, for all the self-proclaimed thought leadership, success in business is as elusive as ever."

2- "...There was talk, over and over, about customer orientation and leadership and organizational efficiency, but these things are hard to measure objectively, so we tend to make attributions about them based on things we do feel certain about - revenues and profits and share price. We may not really know what leads to high performance, so we reach for simple phrases to make sense of what happened."

3- "If we start with the full data set and look objectively at many years of company performance, we find the dominant pattern is not one of enduring performance at all, but one of rise and fall, of growth and decline. Foster and Kaplan conclude: "...Managing for survival, even among the best and most revered corporations does not guarantee strong long term performance for shareholders. In fact, just the opposite is true. In the long run, the markets always win"."

4- "March and Sutton explain: "In its efforts to satisfy these often conflicting demands, the organizational research community sometimes responds by saying that inferences about the causes of performance cannot be made from the data available, and simultaneously goes ahead to make such inference.""

5- "We can't turn back the clock, change one variable, and then run the experiment again...It's easy to blame one man for a company woe's, but these sorts of attributions, while appealing for their simplicity, may not provide the best basis on which to manage a company."

6- "...An organization isn't a system of mechanical parts, interchangeable and replaceable. It's better understood as a sociotechnical system, a combination of mean and machines, of people and things, of hardware and software, but also of ideas and attitudes. Some technical elements can often be copied and applied with predictable results...but when we begin to examine how those technical systems interact with social systems, with people and values and attitudes and expectations, the results are harder to predict."

7- "Managers quite naturally find it easier to keep the attention on execution, which everyone will always agree can be done better."

8- "What leads to high performance?...we're left with two broad categories: strategic choice and execution...In spite of our desire for simple steps, the reality of management is much more uncertain that we would often like to admit - and much more so that our comforting stories would have us believe."

9- "As Tom Peters observed: "To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable to attach. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it.""

Rosenzweig tell all us scientists ask ourselves every time we read a business book - how could the heck they be so certain of that?? It turns out by brilliant hypotesis testing by Rosenzweig they are not. Business writers are not scientists, simple as that. Enlightening, strong, good science skepticism pointed to business analysis. A _MUST_ read. If you have to pick a single book about business, pick this one here. (If you're allowed two or three, go for The Drunkard's Walk and then Freakonomics. Although not specific business books they are going to tell you how things function around in the real world. Ahn, and yeah, Tom Peters is also a good reading. And Feynman, the Physicist.)

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