Why I write this blog

I write this blog because management books are not based in advice from the real world. I have come across a whole host of books so I will provide a couple of thoughts on why management books fall down:

• The habits of successful entrepreneurs style books:
  The way these fall down can be illustrated by a couple of examples.

                                          i.    They are risk takers. This sounds like it is something you could use to shape yourself and so your business. You could try to avoid being too cautious. But hold on a minute; is not the act of starting up your own business a risk? Aren’t all the unsuccessful entrepreneurs proof of that? Clearly this must be one of the habits of unsuccessful entrepreneurs too. Are you sure you want to emulate them?

                                         ii.    They are confident. Well they have been successful, so of course they are confident. Maybe they needed confidence to succeed, so this might be useful, perhaps. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs may have been confident enough about themselves to strike out too. Perhaps the difference is whether the confidence is misplaced? So the lesson really is “be confident but don’t have misplaced confidence”. How do you tell the difference? Well if you are successful it wasn’t misplaced. Hmm, so this isn’t as useful as it first appeared.

• The success was because of my method type books: 
  Rosser reeve was an advertising executive who was responsible for a series of television commercials. These commercials were unpopular. Nobody really liked them but they appeared to be successful. The sales of the advertised products went up during the course of the adverts, and having numbers to back your story up makes it seem much more convincing. The problem was that the rise in sales was unrelated to the adverts. The whole area was expanding and if you had a product in that area your sales went up. Most books on management get their data through looking at the specifics and drawing conclusions about causal relationships. Without the ability to test this leaves them open to falling victim to the same problem.
  What looks like a good argument with figures to back it up is just a post fact story to explain the figures. Clearly there are exceptions to this, but it is always necessary to test how applicable management theories are to your business before you rely on them to light your way. In this book I am not trying to produce a grand theory about how things should work, I am trying to warn of some practical problems that often turn up and suggest things that might help you to solve them for your business. It is as much about understanding the potential problems and how they can be approached as about providing solutions. For more detail about the Rosser Reeve fallacy and other dangers when measuring marketing activity see Company Evolution: Measuring Marketing.

Rufus Evison