Flawed Advice and the Management Trap How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not

by Argyris, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780195132861
• ISBN10: 0195132866
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-01-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not is the first book to show how and why so much of today's business advice is flawed, and how managers and executives can better evaluate advice given to their firms Practitioners and scholars agree that businesses in the coming millennium will be managed differently than firms of the 20th century. And getting there from here, according to today's best advice, will require creative change. In this pioneering work, Argyris, one of the world's leadingorganizational thinkers, reviews a wide array of business advice from the best and brightest thinkers and consultants and concludes that as appealing as their ideas may be, most of them are simply not workable. They are too full of abstract claims, logical gaps, and inconsistencies, to be useful.And ironically, even when their recommendations are implemented correctly, the result is often failure. Why do these gaps in logic exist, and how can they be more effectively discovered? Applying a disciplined critique to numerous representative examples of advice about leadership, learning,change, and employee commitment, Argyris shows readers how to be more critical of the advice they are given, how to learn new approaches for appraising employee performance, and how to generate an internal commitment to values and better strategy. In our ever expanding global market, innovative business advice is at a premium, and giving this advice has become a lucrative industry in and of itself. This book provides the critical lens necessary to evaluate which advice is best for your organization.

Author Biography

Chris Argyris is James Bryant Conant Professor of Orgnizational Behavior, Emeritus at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction	3	(12)
Part I Getting Flawed Advice
Inconsistent and Unactionable Advice	15	(23)
Organizational Consequences of Using Inconsistent Advice	38	(14)
Why Flawed Advice Persists	52	(30)
Human Resources Practices	82	(11)
Concluding Observations	93	(6)
Part II Finding a Model that Works
Critiquing Advice	99	(14)
Appraising Performance: The Dilemmas	113	(14)
Evaluating Group Performance	127	(31)
Generating Internal Commitment to Values	158	(15)
Generating Internal Commitment to Implementing Strategy (with Roger Martin)	173	(46)
Building Generic Competence in Organizational Learning	219	(19)
Summary	238	(11)
Bibliography	249	(6)
Index	255