Five Principles of Evidence-Based Management
In earlier posts I've talked about Jeffrey Pfeffer's views concerning human resource management.Since publishing Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management in 2006, Pfeffer and his co-author Robert Sutton (both men teach at Stanford) have created a rich website devoted to the topic of the book — evidence-based management (EBM).
The website's homepage presents the current formulation of Five Principles of EBM. (Pfeffer and Sutton anticipate that the principles will be tuned and updated over time.) The five principles are:
- Face the hard facts, and build a culture in which people are encouraged to tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
- Be committed to "fact based" decision making — which means being committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions.
- Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype — encourage experimentation and learning by doing.
- Look for the risks and drawbacks in what people recommend — even the best medicine has side effects.
- Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs, what you have done in the past, or on uncritical "benchmarking" of what winners do.
Labels: Management practices
posted by Karen Nelson @ 11:46 PM
<< Home