From Theory to Practice

The Conference Board Review^® Article

Disappointed by the Gurus?
If you don’t like what they have to say, maybe you’re the problem.

By Michael E. Raynor

Michael E. Raynor is with Deloitte Consulting LLP. In addition to consuming theory, he occasionally tries to create some; BusinessWeek named his most recent book, The Strategy Paradox, one of the top 10 books of 2007. He can be reached via www.michaelraynor.com.

There are approximately 200,000 business books in print. That number grows by almost 10,000 titles per year. Can they all have something new to say? No wonder the belief that most business books are a waste of paper is so prevalent. Many of us are jaded, feeling ourselves duped by dust jackets one too many times to take seriously claims of "new" or "breakthrough" any more. The default assumption has become that ideas in business, if they're any good, aren't new — and if they're new, they're no good.

One needn't break new ground to be useful, however. There is genuine value in communicating in fresh ways ideas that we know work but that many of us, for whatever reason, find difficult to implement. This shouldn't surprise us — after all, why should some elements of business be any different from weight loss? The "secret" to dropping a few pounds is simple — "burn more than you consume" — but the psychology of doing that successfully is so fraught that there's always room for a new way of getting us to do what we already know we should. The same applies to listening to customers, rewarding employees, and making time for our families. We all know we should do it, we know a great deal about how to do it . . . but we just find it difficult to actually do it.

I'd put Who Moved My Cheese?, The One Minute Manager, and The Rules in this category: no new content, but their success is testament to the usefulness of re-creating old messages in ways that resonate with people.

A second category of non-theoretical, no-new-ideas-but-entirely-credible type of business book is the inspirational tale: the biography or, more typically, the autobiography of someone whom we admire recounting formative and perhaps anecdotally instructive experiences. From Iacocca to Trump to Welch to Branson, we are motivated and emboldened by the stories of their success.

What has made cynics of us is the purportedly or implicitly theoretical business book. There is, of course, a view that merely by dint of being theoretical a business book has rendered itself useless — because if there's one thing hard-nosed businesspeople don't have time for, it's theory. But I disagree. Good theory is not only the zenith of practicality, theorizing is something we all do, knowingly or not.

The creation of a theory is, at first principles, a statement of cause-and-effect relationships. Such statements, when true, are enormously powerful. Without them, we are limited to observing merely that "one thing follows another," so when we see something new, our ability to predict the outcome is severely curtailed. When facing circumstances we've not already mastered, absent a theory all we can rely on is luck.

So if it's not theory per se that has us tuning out, it must be because there is too much bad theory out there, right? There is some truth to that. Most business books are mediocre, and there have been efforts of late to make consumers of theory savvier and, by extension, efforts to hold creators of shoddy theory to account. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton points out that breakthroughs are rare, that most knowledge builds incrementally, and, consequently, that few ideas are truly new. Phil Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect goes further still, calling onto the carpet much of the pantheon of popular management science to point out errors in method that render their advice essentially groundless.

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