Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense Quotes

“Michael Schrage is right: “A collaboration of incompetents, no matter how diligent or well-meaning, cannot be successful.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“When two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a wonderful substitute for thinking.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“are frequently based on hope or fear, what others seem to be doing, what senior leaders have done and believe has worked in the past, and their dearly held ideologies—in short, on lots of things other than the facts.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“Nortel—another troubled networking company that suffered operating problems as a result of botched mergers.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“Cisco figured out that mergers between similar-sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity (think Daimler-Chrysler or Dean Witter–Morgan Stanley). Cisco’s leaders also determined that mergers work best when companies are geographically proximate, making integration and collaboration much easier (think Synoptics and Wellfleet Communication, which were not only about equal in size, but 2,500 miles apart), and they also uncovered the importance of organizational cultural”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“Siebel’s business development executive admitted that all of the company’s acquisitions have failed and noted that an internal study indicated that “cultural conflicts” were the cause in every case.5”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“most mergers—some estimates are 70 percent or more—fail to deliver their intended benefits and destroy economic value in the process. A recent analysis of 93 studies covering more than 200,000 mergers published in peer-reviewed journals showed that, on average, the negative effects of a merger on shareholder value become evident less than a month after a merger is announced and persist thereafter.2”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“Research by Cornell’s Robert Frank and his colleagues showed that the percentage of students choosing unethical options on an honesty test increased dramatically among students taking microeconomics courses, but not among students in astronomy classes.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“(like the BMW mechanic who handed Robert Sutton a survey and pleaded for a five on a five-point scale, because otherwise he would get in trouble).”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management

“Between 1999 and 2002, the Yankees paid over three times what the A’s paid for the average player on their roster. The Yankee payroll was $130 million in 2002; that of the A’s, just $40 million. Yet the difference in performance between the two teams was surprisingly small considering the vast difference in salaries. The Yankees made the championship playoffs in 2000, 2001, and 2002, but so did the A’s. The Yankees did go all the way to the World Series in 2000 and 2001, and won it in 2000. But during the 2002 regular season, the A’s and the Yankees each won 103 games. Just think what the A’s might have accomplished with the combination of evidence and unlimited budget.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management