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Pfeffer (left) and Sutton |
About the Evidence-Based Management
Site
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Evidence-based management is a simple idea. It just means finding the best
evidence that you can, facing those facts, and acting on those facts – rather
than doing what everyone else does, what you have always done, or what you
thought was true. It isn’t an excuse for inaction. Leaders of organizations must
have the courage to act on the best facts they have right now, and the humility
to change what they do as better information is found. And it isn’t new or
original. Yet surprisingly few organizations actually do it – and those that do
trump the competition. Our primary professional goal over the next few years is
to help spark an evidence-based management movement.
As a first step, we wrote
Hard
Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting
from
Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Business School Press,
2006). The aim of this website is to go beyond the ideas and articles in that
book, to report on, encourage, and demonstrate what evidence-based management is
and how organizations can practice it. This website also serves as a
resource for an updated new course that Robert Sutton is teaching in
Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering in the 2006-07
academic year,
Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach. We have
also identified a set of principles that are hallmarks of evidence-based
management. As with everything else on this website, as we learn more about
evidence-based management and how to practice it, we expect this list to evolve
over time.
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