Ugh! Now Someone Searching For Excellence Moved My Cheese!

 

Last week I went on a tear over the so-called business fable genre being used as a means to advance management science theories or hypotheses, but its near-relative, the use of selected “real life” case studies that align along certain thematic trends that just happen to support the author’s pre-determined hypotheses, is hardly much better.

There are several reasons for this, all of which pertain to the nature of the scientific method and rules of evidence. Now, I fully recognize the difficulties involved in trying to either validate or overturn a given management science theory using the scientific method, since the laboratory in which we’re attempting to do so – the free marketplace – is an overwhelming complex (if not out-and-out chaotic) environment, making the isolation of individual parameters or causal effects virtually impossible. But that complexity is not reason enough to abandon the attempt, and resort to either completely made-up supporting data (as in the case of the business fable), or else completely anecdotal evidence, unchallenged by people outside the researchers’ circle. And this is, unfortunately, exactly what Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. did in their infamous book In Search of Excellence.

Probably the primary reason that anecdotal evidence is not allowed in a court of law nor in the hard sciences is due to its vulnerability in allowing the researchers’ confirmation bias to enter in to the data set. Confirmation bias occurs because we humans tend to note and include happenings or data points that confirm our outlook or beliefs – theories – in our memories, and ignore or exclude data that either challenges or overturns those beliefs. In Search of Excellence exhibits this vulnerability in three areas:

1.      The selection of the organizations being profiled,

2.      The way the authors connected the dots, or created the narrative that explained why the selected organizations were successful, and

3.      Exactly what represented “success.”

In December 2001, Fast Company printed an article attributed to Tom Peters (actually written by Adam Webber after an interview with Peters) entitled “Tom Peters True Confessions,” which included the following:

If you want to go find smart people who are doing cool stuff from which you can learn the most useful, cutting-edge principles, then do what we did with Search: Start by using common sense, by trusting your instincts, and by soliciting the views of "strange" (that is, nonconventional) people. You can always worry about proving the facts later.[i]

Hmmm. Smart people, doing cool stuff, common sense, trusting instincts, soliciting the views of “strange” people, worry about proving facts later. Obviously a completely objective approach to selecting the organizations to be used if ever there was.

As far as evaluating the narrative that Peters and Waterman put forward, that’s difficult to do. Not because of its complexity, mind you, but because it is extremely inchoate. The eight themes read like a team of fortune cookie fortune writers were forced to use nothing but business jargon to reveal the blindingly obvious, resulting in such gems as “hands-on, value driven,” and “close to the customer.”

Then there’s the matter of which organizations should be considered sufficiently successful so that their business approaches – even if they are accurately captured and articulated – ought to be emulated. To be fair, most of the organizations evaluated in the book would end up performing rather well. However, Atari, Xerox, and Wang Labs made the list, and (among others) would end up being the poster children for organizations that absolutely ought not to be imitated, much less identified as being excellent.

Those things having been pointed out, it’s hard to argue with success. In Search of Excellence was an international best-seller, and has been called one of the most influential management books ever. Yes, I freely admit, it’s awfully hard to argue with success.

But it’s easy to argue against intellectual vapidity.