Three Myths of Management

Thursday, March 30, 2006

1. Casual benchmarking
There is nothing wrong with learning from others' experience-vicarious learning, as contrasted with direct experience, is an important way for both people and organizations to learn how to navigate a path through the world. After all, it is a lot cheaper and easier to learn from the mistakes, setbacks, and successes of others than to treat every management challenge as something no organization has ever faced before. So benchmarking-using other companies' performance and experience to set standards for your own company-makes a lot of sense. In the end, good or bad performance is defined and measured largely in relation to what others are doing.

The fundamental problem is that few companies, in their urge to copy ever ask the basic question of why something might enhance performance. Before you run off to benchmark mindlessly, spending effort and money that results in no payoff, or worse yet, in problems that you never had before, ask yourself:

Is the success you observe by the benchmarking target because of the practice you seek to emulate?

Why is a particular practice linked to performance improvement-what is the logic?

What are the downsides and disadvantages to implementing the practice, even if it is a good idea? Are there ways of mitigating these problems, perhaps ways your target uses that you aren't seeing?

2. Doing what (seems to have) worked in the past
There is nothing wrong with learning from experience and developing proficiency at certain strategies and tactics. The problems come when the new situation is different from the past and when what we "learned" was right in the past may have been wrong, or incomplete, in the first place.

As in benchmarking, asking some simple questions and acting on their answers can help avoid the bad results that come from mindlessly repeating the past:

Are you sure that the practice that you are about to repeat is associated with the past success? Be careful to not confuse success that has occurred in spite of some policy or action with success that has occurred because of that action.

Is the new situation-the business, the technology, the customers, the business model, the competitive environment-so similar to past situations that what worked in the past will work in the new setting?

Why do you think the past practice you intend to use again has been effective? If you cannot unpack the logic of why things have worked, it is unlikely you will be able to determine whether or not they will work this time.

3. Following deeply held yet unexamined ideologies
The third flawed and widespread basis for decisions often does the most damage because it is the most difficult to change. It happens when people are overly influenced by deeply held ideologies or beliefs—causing their organization to adopt some management practice not because it is based on sound logic or hard facts but because managers "believe" it works, or it matches their (sometimes flawed) assumptions about what propels people and organizations to be successful.
To avoid succumbing to using belief or ideology over evidence, ask yourself:

Is my preference for a particular management practice solely or mostly because it fits with my intuitions about people and organizations?

Am I requiring the same level of proof and the same amount of data regardless of whether or not the issue is one I believe in?

And, most important, are my colleagues and I allowing our beliefs to cloud our willingness to gather and consider data that may be pertinent to our choices?