Jeffrey Pfeffer

Books

• The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
  

• Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
  

Articles

• Congressional Testimonry About Evidence-Based Practices   view details
  "First, organizations in both the public and private sector ought to base policies not on casual benchmarking, on ideology or belief, on what they have done in the past or what they are comfortable with doing, but instead should implement evidence-based m

• Why Managing by Facts Works   view details
  "From our research, we are convinced that when companies base decisions on evidence, they enjoy a competitive advantage. And even when little or no data is available, there are things executives can do that allow them to rely more on evidence and logic an

• Woes? Executive, Blame Thyself.   view details
  "So, the next time you hear an airline executive complain about their problems, ask two questions. How much is that person actually getting paid? It ought to be relatively inexpensive to find someone to blame others for his company's difficulties -- how h

• Lay Off the Layoffs   view details
  "Despite all the research suggesting downsizing hurts companies, managers everywhere continue to do it. That raises an obvious question: why? Part of the answer lies in the immense pressure corporate leaders feel—from the media, from analysts, from peers—to follow the crowd no matter what. ... The facts seem clear. Layoffs are mostly bad for companies, harmful for the economy, and devastating for employees."

• Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer   view details
  Interview by Guy Kawaasaki. "companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people. Maybe the parts should work together. Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior. That is also incorrect."

Author Quotes

• Managers don't like giving appraisals, and employees don't like getting them. Perhaps they're not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don't work.
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  The most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don't accurately assess performance.
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  Possibly the biggest issue, however, is that performance appraisals focus managers' attention on precisely the wrong thing: individual people. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught a long time ago, company performance often results more from variations in systems than from the individuals doing the work.

  View details

  The Trouble with Performance Reviews