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

by Chris Argyris

Flawed Advice and the Management 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 leading organizational 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.

Genres: Business, Management, Leadership

276 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 13, 1999

About the author

Chris Argyris is a director of elite strategy consulting firm, the Monitor Group, and is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School.

Agyris's early research focused on the unintended consequences for individuals of formal organizational structures, executive leadership, control systems, and management information systems, and on how individuals adapted to change those consequences. He then turned his attention to ways of changing organizations, especially the behavior of executives at the upper levels of organization.

During the past decade, Argyris has been developing, a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning (not just behavior) becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Reviews

[Ryan Barretto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a deep book about people's behaviour in the organization, and how difficult it is for them to become aware of their defensive and ineffective behaviour, much less change it.

The author provides examples and transcripts of discussions making it easier for the reader to understand these points.

This is a must read for OD practitioners at any level.

[André Heijstek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uitstekend boek dat helder maakt dat we heel snel werken met een "espoused theory": een manier van werken die we uitdragen, en een "theory in use": een theorie die we zelf toepassen. En helaas zijn beide theorieën vaak niet hetzelfde ;-(

[Jurgen Appelo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very good insights about management advice that is too abstract, and differences between espoused theories and theories-in-use. But I didn't like the long analyses of interviews. And some ideas (such as model I vs model II, and requiring causality) seem too simplistic to me.