Deconstructing Management Maxims, Volume I

Acknowledgments

The spirit of evidentiary criticism conveyed in these pages has been influenced by hundreds of authors and their works. A handful of contemporary books stand out, including Phil Rosenzweig’s Halo Effect and Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers; Jeffrey Pfeffer’s and Robert Sutton’s Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-truths and Total Nonsense; Pfeffer’s Leadership BS; Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies; Scott Shane’s Illusions of Entrepreneurship; and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Needless to say I highly recommend these authors and books, for each in their own way dares to call out commonly accepted yet flawed thinking.

I have used empirical evidence, original scholarship, findings from other ...