I'm Sorry I broke Your Company

About this book

This is not an academic book offering original research or proof positive of my ideas. This is the story of how I came to realize that everything I believed about business was wrong. It's my story woven with the rise and fall of some of the management fads I helped propagate. I chose the examples based on how they changed my thinking about what I was doing. The first three chapters recount my experiences with strategy development, process improvements, and metrics implementations. Many of the examples in these chapters are from my early career as a young consultant, when I worked for large consultancies. The next four chapters discuss the methods that fall under the banner of «talent management» and cover performance management systems, management models, high-potential programs, and leadership competencies. Most of the examples in these chapters relate to my experiences in a later part of my career in the corporate world, where I got to live through many of the methods I had helped implement.

I would like to be very clear about my purpose. The point of this book is to debunk the conventional business wisdom and not to add to it. Although I offer my recommendations, I offer them as alternatives to the theories that don t work. For the most part, I recommend replacing the model or process with a candid conversation among colleagues. Unfortunately, I haven’t done a major study to show that improving dialogue and relationships has a business benefit. I will let you be the judge of that theory. Fortunately, debunking a theory is much easier. It requires only one piece of evidence that disproves it. I’m going to repeat this because most consultants I know have a hard time understanding this: you need only one piece of contrary evidence to disprove a theory. Proving a theory to be true is much harder, requiring that it works in all situations. This is where management consultants often get it wrong. They find something that works once or twice and label it a best practice to be followed by everyone when it is useful only in a specific situation.

I offer recommendations and alternatives as a starting point to help us get out of the faulty thinking that pervades today, like «You can’t manage what you can’t measure.» (Well, yes you can!) I am in no way suggesting that I have the solutions. I’m just suggesting that instead of implementing a method that is often wrong, we try doing something else that might work. I’m suggesting that we cut through the dogma to find the kernel of truth and base our new solutions on that truth. Isn’t it better to have only a chance of being wrong than to most certainly be wrong? I think that’s pretty obvious. In fact, if I were to describe what this book is about, I think it’s about the really obvious.