What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Brief article - Book review

What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management. By Jeffrey Pfeffer. Harvard Business School Press, 241 pages. $25.

There's a beguiling central theme to this book: conventional management wisdom is frequently all wet. Author Pfeffer, a longtime professor at Stanford Business School and author or co-author of a number of management books, cogently and succinctly dissects a lot of common thinking about management strategies and finds it wanting.

In a chapter entitled "Stop Picking Employees' Pockets," for instance, he examines the time-honored concept of cutting wages and hours to trim labor costs. A key problem, he writes, is that labor costs don't necessarily correlate with labor rates--and that "a fixation on labor costs diverts management's attention from other aspects of operations that might provide even more leverage." Moreover, the resulting alienation of employees sends all the wrong signals about worker retention and the company being a desirable place to work.

In another example, Pfeffer tackles the...