This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap
Sometime in the 1980s, Harvard Professor John Kotter became intensely interested in how change succeeds and fails within organizations. He examined roughly 100 firms, evaluated their performance, and then interviewed executives in an effort to understand what went right, what went wrong and how things could be done better.
That led to Kotter’s 8-step change process, which still forms the basis for most change management efforts today. Six years later he teamed up with Deloitte to interview 200 more executives and, incredibly, learned nothing new but found the identical 8-steps at work. With such massive corroboration, who could question the results?
This is generally how business ideas get established and it is a very shoddy way to go about things. Case study interviews of self-serving executives are prone to enormous amounts of bias. Unless controls are put in place and corroborating research from other fields is examined, the result is likely to be more superstition and lore than fact-based analysis.
The Path Of Least Resistance
Organizations — especially profit-seeking corporations — are notoriously difficult to research. With shareholders, donors and customers to please, not to mention colleagues and superiors to impress, executives need to be…
