Leadership BS Quotes

“a large body of empirical research conducted over decades suggests that student evaluations are more than unhelpful; instead, they are likely to change the behaviors of presenters in ways that make learning and personal growth less likely. That is one reason why Armstrong concluded that “teacher ratings are detrimental to students.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Deming argued that if there are performance problems and quality defects, one needs to understand how those problems arise almost naturally as a consequence of how a system has been designed—and then fix those design flaws. Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system—whether or not they deserved it.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Asian professionals are frequently held back from senior positions by the perception that they don’t have “executive presence,” a factor that similarly operates against other minority groups in the workplace, including women.39 And what constitutes executive presence? Certainly not modesty:”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“that leaders inspire trust, be authentic, tell the truth, serve others (particularly those who work for and with them), be modest and self-effacing, exhibit empathic understanding and emotional intelligence, and other similar seemingly sensible nostrums.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Measuring the wrong thing is often worse than measuring nothing, because you do get what you measure. So if the assessments focus on how much people “enjoy” the experience—be that reading a book, watching a talk, or going to a training session—those same books, talks, and trainings will respond to those measurements by prioritizing the wrong outcomes: making participants feel good and giving them a good time. Simply stated, measuring entertainment value produces great entertainment, not change; measuring the wrong things crowds out assessing other, more relevant indicators such as improvements in workplaces. Improvement comes from employing measurements that are appropriate, those that are connected to the areas in which we seek improvement. In the case of leadership, that appropriate measurement would include assessing the frequency of desirable leader behaviors; actual workplace conditions such as engagement, satisfaction, and”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“No one who is unmemorable is going to be chosen for an important job, because one cannot select what one cannot remember.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“our ability to accurately discern who is taking advantage of us is remarkably poor.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. Why? Because the data suggest that trust is notable mostly by its absence. Nevertheless, organizations continue to roll along, as do their leaders who seemingly suffer few consequences for being untrustworthy.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“companies with high levels of workplace trust enjoy higher stock market returns.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“career prospects of employees who report corporate malfeasance are so dismal that it is surprising that people whistleblow at all.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“overconfident individuals achieved higher social status, respect, and influence in groups.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“prioritizing the wrong outcomes: making participants feel good and giving them a good time. Simply stated, measuring entertainment value produces great entertainment, not change; measuring the wrong things crowds out assessing other, more relevant indicators”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“to change the world of work and leadership, we need to get beyond the half truths and self-serving stories that are so prominent today.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“qualities we actually select for and reward in most workplaces are precisely the ones that are unlikely to produce leaders who are good for employees or, for that matter, for long-term organizational performance.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Workplaces are mostly—and there are obviously notable exceptions—not what many people apparently seek from them: communal settings in which people take care of each other, provide economic security and social support, and possibly even provide meaning and purpose from the work people do. Of course a few organizations—the best-places-to-work lists are a good source for many of them—do all these things. But don’t count on your place of employment being one of them. Unfortunately, most people are understandably reluctant to heed this message.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“For instance, even though entrepreneurs in technology often know the statistics that about 80 percent of founders are forced out of their companies by their venture capital investors, I have never heard anyone tell me that this would happen to them. In”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“we are predisposed to trust and have an evolutionary need to do so. Therefore, people are motivated to overlook a violation of trust”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“The most fundamental principle of learning theory is that behavior is a function of its consequences. When”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Rather, companies improve their quality by defining what the idea means in terms of specific operational measures, then routinely and frequently assessing those aspects of performance, sharing the outcomes with everyone (often in graphical form), and holding people accountable for improving the measures that are under their control. When”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“you change people’s behavior by having them set some specific, measurable goals, reminding them of what they have committed to do, measuring their activities and providing frequent feedback, and providing positive reinforcement for progress. Effective”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Systematic research supports the message of these cases. As noted in an article in the New York Times, “even in the most extreme circumstances—like the financial crisis—directors bore little consequence for their poor decisions.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Leaders who have come up through the ranks and have done many if not most of the organization’s jobs are much more likely to look out for the interests of those they lead because they have been there themselves.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“The way leadership gurus try to demonstrate their legitimacy is not through their scientific knowledge or accomplishments but rather by achieving public notoriety—be it the requisite TED talks, blog posts, Twitter followers, or books filled with leadership advice that might or might not be valid and useful.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“is also famous for his outbursts of temper and his put-downs of employees,”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“evidence shows most workplaces filled with distrustful, disengaged, dissatisfied, despairing employees.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“givers were not only among the most successful individuals,”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“were also among the least successful, and he provided advice about how to be generous without being a patsy.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“SAS Institute has resisted going public because Jim Goodnight, the CEO, is concerned about the effects of public ownership on its employee-centric, family-oriented culture. So long as he holds all the cards, his workers’ loyalty is probably justified, but only so much as they can be certain that he’ll be in charge forever. Which”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“workplaces are primarily instrumental, calculative settings largely free of moral sentiments and even normative constraints.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“in work settings, things become a lot more calculative. Specifically, people make more evaluations of whether or not coworkers and superiors could be useful in the future; likewise, people show more concern with the future than with repaying past kindnesses.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time