This is a difficult and dull book to read. While I respect the advice of a senior director who suggested it to me, after months of making various casual and semi-serious attempts at digging into this, I give up! I perused through some of it, read a few chapters, and was mostly unable to fully appreciate the philosophies outlined in “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense“.
Having read several pleasurable business books – an oxymoron, is it not, and all the more credit to the authors of those books – I was wishfully thinking this to be another insight fully written book. Pfeffer and Sutton go through painstakingly long and deliriously detailed examples to drive their points home. I initially took an interest in this book to learn more about sound management practices. Here I will share few of my takeaways as well as some areas of discord.
The authors cover good management topics. For instance, the question on the right quantity of data needed before one is able to make a sound business decision? We face this dilemma every day: How much information is enough? How much would be too much? Oren Harari covers a great section in his book about Colin Powell’s leadership, concluding that if you wait too long to make a decision, it will indeed be too late, and the opportunity will be missed. My favorite quote was Pfeffer’s Law, “Instead of being interested in what is new, we ought to be interested in what is true”.
The focus on dangerous half-truths and total nonsense has its interesting moments, if one can make it alive through the small-font text on page upon page full of dry, dull verbiage. I do love business and I do enjoy learning, and even so, this book comes short on delivery and it is painful to sit through these pages. I read enough to formulate an opinion, I wonder if my opinion itself qualifies as a dangerous half-truth, from an unfinished book. Well, it is what it is and it is what I took away with the time invested in the book and here it is for my readers.
Reading is the best pastime for an active mind! If you like to see the other book reviews, check the index of In Print.
This was one of the sections in the book with which I identified. Is work really that different and isolated from the rest of our life, the authors implore. Can we really separate work from life, in a constantly changing environment, where we chat with our friends and run reports at the same instant, on the same screen and using the same tools? Can we have one personality for one and another for the other, and happily exist in both “roles”? Work and personal life are intertwined, like leaves of the same branch, brushing each other in the wind, supporting one another, and existing for one another and because of one another. To completely separate the two means destroying the branch and for no good reason at all. The section “Work does not have to be different from the rest of life” describes how a dichotomy may not make sense, and manager and leaders alike should refrain from imposing one on their employees. An integrated life is what we live, and we should enrich and embrace it as such.
There were instances in the book where collective thinking was preferred method of performance measurement over individual talent and competition. I disagree. I see team work is a valuable means to accomplishing tasks. Yet we bring our own contributions to the table, and we ought to be rewarded for individual performance. Those who impact more of the business need to be rewarded for their exact level of contribution. In a collective business world where the top dog and the slow rat work on the same project, and both are rewarded equally, we would lose the top dog to a competitor and would be at the mercy of the slow rat. Whatever business management strategy we adopt, I respect Jack Welch‘s theories in never rewarding mediocrity, lest we forget that, while teamwork is important and valuable, true contribution can and should be measured on individual scale.
Perhaps another lesson I walked away with from this book was the willingness to put the book down without finishing. The obsession to finish every book that I start has often not served me well. Learning to put that theory into practice, and realizing that the number of excellent books out there is far too many and our time ever so limited, is part of living well.
If you like what you read here, please subscribe to my blog post updates via your favorite RSS reader, Email or follow me on Twitter.
