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Phil Rosenzweig

The halo effect and other misconceptions of every manager...

To my parents Mark and Jeanine Rosenzweig

The Halo Effect: …and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Rosenzweig

Originally published by Free Press, a division of Simon&Schuster, Inc.


© Israfilov F. A., translation into Russian, 2019

© Publishing House Eksmo LLC, 2019

Reviews of the book "The Halo Effect"

One of best books business in 2007.

Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal

Annual Accenture Award for best article of the year: “Misunderstanding the Nature of Company Efficiency: The Halo Effect and Other Business Illusions.”

California Management Review Summer 2007

“I was consumed by this book. She demystifies the explanations for success in the management literature by making persuasive arguments based on facts. It should become one of the most important books on management ever and an antidote to the many bestsellers from gurus presenting unreliable models and naive arguments.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan

“In The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig did us all a great service by expressing the unspeakable. His open-minded analysis was a welcome antidote to the superficial, stereotypical, and absurdly simplified explanations that underlie today's popular business books. This is the right book at the right time."

John R. Kimberly Professor of Entrepreneurship Henry Bauer, Wharton School Professor, University of Pennsylvania

“Books on business very rarely combine a realistic perception of the world and scientific rigor. Rosenzweig's book is a striking exception - it is a magnificent work, the need for which is long overdue.

Philip E. Tetlock, Lorraine M. Tyson Second Chair for Leadership and Communications, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

“Rosenzweig not only ridicules bad writing and pseudoscience in management. It explains why they are so bad and what you can still learn from them despite the authors' efforts."

John Kay, Financial Times journalist and author of Everlasting Light Bulbs: How Economics Illuminates the World

“He writes masterfully, uses simple and illustrative examples, is strict but not pedantic, and does his best to be fair to those so-called experts whom he blows to smithereens.”

Conference Board

"An insightful look at business and advice on doing it."

The Wall Street Journal

“This is an amazing, well-argued book that challenges much of what we know about business, leading us to view research findings with great skepticism. This is more of an appeal to reason than practical guide for managers, but it really helps to appreciate what's behind the new (and old) ideas we're being told about."

Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“A review of a significant portion of the business literature, showing that the advice given in countless best-selling business books may be much less useful than it seems ... Detailed, sometimes devastating, debriefing of numerous business books and popular business analyzes.”

John Kay, Management Today

"A cheeky new book that shows how issues of research methodology and misinformation are damaging the management literature, turning it into encouraging parables rather than solid evidence-based guides... including books by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras" Built to Last and Collins' Good to Great, arguably the most influential management publications in recent years.

Simon Culkin, The Observer

"Refreshes and corrects."

Simon Hoggart, The Guardian

“Rosenzweig deserves a round of applause for his bold, provocative work…He has posed a serious challenge to his business school colleagues and also to the business media.”

The Financial Times

“A masterful debunking of many myths and misconceptions in management. If you want to avoid another silly fantasy and, as Kipling wrote, "control yourself among the crowd of confused, swearing at you for the confusion of everyone," then this book is an excellent guide.

Professor Andrew Campbell, Ashridge Business School and author of The Growth Gamble

"A brilliant and sobering book."

Vuyo Jack, Business Report (South Africa)

The halo effect and other business illusions

Illusion #1: The Halo Effect

The tendency to draw inferences about a company's culture, leadership, values, and other performance under the influence of its overall performance. In fact, much of what we believe is the reason for the improvement in the company's performance is just our assessment based on its results.

Illusion #2: The Illusion of Correlation and Causation

Two variables may be correlated, but we don't know which is the cause and which is the effect. Does employee satisfaction lead to high performance? Evidence suggests that the success of companies has a stronger effect on employee satisfaction than vice versa.

Illusion No. 3. The illusion of non-systemic explanations

Many studies show how a single factor—a good company culture, customer focus, or a strong leader—leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly interdependent, the effect of each individual is often less than we think.

Illusion No. 4. The illusion of only victories

If we choose a number of successful companies and start to explore what they have in common, we can hardly find the reasons for their success without being able to compare them with others that are less successful.

Illusion No. 5. The illusion of meticulous research

The effectiveness of a study is determined by the quality of the data, not the quantity: if the quality of the data leaves much to be desired, then their quantity no longer matters.

Illusion No. 6. The illusion of long-term stable success

The performance of even the most successful companies degrades over time. The idea of ​​finding a plan of action that would guarantee stable and lasting success is, of course, attractive, but unattainable.

Illusion No. 7. The illusion of an absolute result

The results of companies are always relative. For example, a company can objectively improve its results, but at the same time lag even further behind competitors.

Illusion #8 The Misinterpretation Illusion

Just because successful companies often use targeted strategies does not mean that such strategies necessarily lead to success.

Illusion No. 9. Illusion of similarity

The performance of companies is not subject to the immutable laws of nature and cannot be predicted with scientific accuracy - as much as we would like to.

Foreword

This book is about business and management, success and failure, science and fiction. It is written to help managers think for themselves, without relying on the advice of a variety of experts, consultants, and opinion leaders, each of whom claims to have discovered something new and hitherto unknown to anyone. Think of this book as a guide for the thinking manager to help him separate the wheat from the chaff.

If someone needs a manual that reveals the secret of success, the formula for market dominance, or six simple steps to prosperity, then this kind of literature is more than enough. Every year, dozens of new books promise to reveal the secrets to the success of leading companies such as General Electric, Toyota, Starbucks, and Google. " Learn these secrets and apply them to yourself!” Just as many books are about business stars such as Michael Dell, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs or Richard Branson. " Find out how they managed to become great, and do the same! Other books will tell you how to turn a company into an innovation pipeline, create a solid strategy and a clear organization, and leave all competitors behind. " That's how you can easily defeat everyone!

In fact, despite all the secrets, formulas, guarantees and promises, the path to business success is still just as elusive. Rather, it is now even less clear than ever, given the growing global competition and the ever-faster pace of technology innovation. Perhaps that is why we are so attracted by these promises, revealed secrets and secrets, ready recipes quick solutions that in extreme circumstances you want miraculous remedies.

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ATHaven't taken off your pink glasses for a long time? Then grab this book. The author offers a guide for thinking leaders on separating flies from cutlets. If most business books are the equivalent of a cookbook: if you do this, it will work, then this book changes emphasis:Why is it so difficult to understand the reasons for high results?

What did Rosenzweig do? He dissected the business bestsellers of all times and peoples "", "Built to Last" and "" and supplemented them with statistics for the periods that have passed since the companies were transferred to the category of "great fortunes". Result: after the clock struck twelve, almost two-thirds of the princesses turned into gray mice. The reason is the "halo effect": the high performance of companies at the time of the study played a cruel joke on the researchers. The author teaches managers to be prudent in how they should perceive the conclusions of management gurus.

At the end of the book, the author still tries to answer the question: what leads to high results? He believes that if you leave alone the usual suspects - leadership, culture, focus, etc. - which would be more correct to consider as attributes of results, but not their causes, everything will be reduced to two main criteria: strategy and its implementation. The first is fraught with risks, since it is based on hypotheses, the second with uncertainty, since drugs are good for some, for others they will turn out to be poison. That is why Rosenzweig suggests betting not on the formula for success, but on successful managers, citing the well-known Ani Grove and others as an example.

Metaphors.Bring a couple that I liked. First."Cisco didn't talk about the gold sands of the Internet. They sold shovels and picks to Internet miners, so much so that there was a queue of people who wanted to buy." Second."When explaining failure, it is always easier to claim poor performance than to think seriously about strategy. It's easier to say that we are going in the right direction, you just need to step up. Admitting that we were going in the wrong direction is usually painful and drugs have a side effect."

Outcome.The book is not boring and is read in one breath. You will not find the Philosopher's Stone in it, but after reading it you will be able to take a sober look at your previous search for the Holy Grail. I recommend you read along with her:

  • Evans F., Wooster T.S. .
  • Nicholas J. Carr. .

Thanks.Many thanks to Stas Davydov for providing the book

Column "new book sales" newspaper "Vedomosti".
The column leader is Andrey Kuzmichev, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor of the State Higher School of Economics.

Phil Rosenzweig "The halo effect...and eight other illusions that mislead managers"
St. Petersburg: BESTBUSINESSBOOKS, 2008. 250 p.

Every day, top managers discuss numerous "variations on the most burning question of all time: what actions lead to high results?". "This is the quintessence of questions in the business world," says Professor Phil Rosenzweig dryly and furiously, with knowledge of the matter, smashes those who, under the guise of serious research, promote themselves and customers.

Among them were such luminaries of management as Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Jim Crollins and Jerry Porras ( detailed analysis their errors are contained in the appendix to the book). Michael Porter and Anita McGahan also got credit for a study where they "set out to determine the extent to which a company's profitability depends on the industry in which it operates, the corporation to which it belongs, and the methods it uses."

Rosenzweig notes that the researchers labeled the latter category as "segment specific impact", which included consumer orientation, culture, HR management, social responsibility, etc. As a result, "the authors found that 32% of company results can be attributed to" specificity ". But after all, its authors did not understand inside, and in fact, as Rosenzweig writes, as a result, the observed "effects were superimposed on each other, explaining the same 32%".

Why do thousands of researchers build the Tower of Babel out of pseudo-labor and try, sometimes quite successfully, to trade their ideas? The reason for this, according to Rosenzweig, is the halo effect - our desire to "create an idea about a subject that is too far from you, often simply inaccessible to direct judgment, in order to bring it closer and evaluate", the human tendency "to grasp at information that is at first glance significant, concrete, which gives the impression of being objective, and projecting it onto objects that are abstract and ambiguous."

In the world of books, there is the same ambiguity. Rosenzweig cites Stanford University's James March and Robert Sutton as saying that "organizational research exists in two very different worlds". "The first is addressed to practicing managers and is full of reflections on how to improve results - say the professors. - Here we find studies whose purpose is to inspire and soothe. The second requires following strict criteria of knowledge and encourages it. Here the supremacy of science, not history."

Why among the bestsellers are mostly books from the first world, explains illusion number 9: "the fallacy of organizational physics." Its essence is that for most researchers, all companies are "made of the same atoms." As a result, many "like to think that some higher order rules the world of business according to strict rules making it unmistakable and predictable."

Rosenzweig argues that the most popular ideas in business are nothing more than soothing platitudes promising quick success to worried managers. These "business illusions": common and deeply rooted beliefs are the result of the "halo effect", or, in other words, our need to attribute exclusively positive qualities to any company that achieves success. Believing in these illusions provides managers with reassurance to justify decisions, while also allowing them to greatly simplify reality and ignore the constant demands of changing technologies, markets, and consumers.

The book also shatters myths about success built on empiricism and talks about things that for a long time no one dared to speak out loud. The author turns to common sense and statistics to take a critical look at the numerous "five-" or "four-" step construction myths. successful company. The book proves with examples that a) there is no secret recipe for corporate success and b) success is a volatile thing.

Press about the book and the author

"In the world of business, not everything is in order with thinking" Dmitry Lisitsyn, The Secret of the Firm magazine, No. 41, 2008

“Have you taken off your rose-colored glasses for a long time? » Eduard Kolotukhin, eduardk.livejournal.com 2010

"Phil Rosenzweig The Halo Effect...and Eight Other Illusions That Mislead Managers" SU-HSE professor Andrey Kuzmichev, Vedomosti, October 7, 2008

"And you will be successful" Vera Krasnova, editor of the management department, Expert magazine, October 27, 2008. №42 (631)

Phil Rosenzweig is an IMD professor in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he collaborates with leading companies on strategy and organization. He received his PhD from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at Harvard Business School for six years. A native of northern California.

Best business book 2007 in ratings Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe
communities: getAbstract, leadershipnow, 800CEORead

When Reuters approached Tom Peters, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins for commentary on The Halo Effect, Peters admitted that his book In Search of Perfection is not a prescription. the only way creating a "great company," Porras, co-author of Built to Last, denied offering a "path" to lasting success, and said he warned readers "of the implications of the causes and effects of the examples presented."
Jim Collins - the author of "From good to great" turned out to be from the comments.

“The books In Search of Excellence and Built to Last are great stories containing genuine insights from thoughtful observers of management practice. The place of the “Halo Effect” on the same shelf with them.”
Management Today

"This is a book for executives who are not looking for quick success recipes and who understand that victory depends on knowing their company and making smart decisions - with a little bit of luck."
The Wall Street Journal
“Rosenzweig does not just make fun of a pile of pseudoscientific writings. He explains exactly why it is bad and what can be gleaned from it, despite the efforts of the authors.
John Kay Financial Times columnist and author of The Hare and the Turtle

"In The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig teaches a lesson in the 'illusion' that managers and the business press need alike."
Economist.com

In my opinion, Phil has written a terrific book that reminds all leaders of the dangers of jumping to conclusions and that much of what we think is accurate knowledge of the business is in fact not sufficiently supported by serious research.
David Meister, business consultant

“This book debunks the myths in management literature about the causes of business success. One of the most important management books of all time against the bestsellers of various gurus with their empty talk and naive argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness

"The smartest and most common way to get turkeys to vote for Christmas themselves is to use a 'turn up' strategy."