Please register to receive the benefits of our network-wide features. Register (free) | Log In
Advertisers/Partners
Jeffrey Pfeffer
Professor of Organizational Behavior - Stanford Business School
Evidence-Based Management
Stanford Discussions
65 minutes, 29.9mb, recorded 2006-09-26
Image caption: Jeffrey Pfeffer
Jeffrey Pfeffer

"Organizational decisions are made based upon the wrong things," declares Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Pfeffer demonstrates at the 2006 Nonprofit Institute, convened by the Center for Social Innovation's publication, the "Stanford Social Innovation Review," how executives do what everyone else does, what they or their management have always done, or what they think will work. Pfeffer urges nonprofit leaders to embrace evidence-based management.

Decision makers do things because they believe in them or because the competition is doing it. Management is filled with fads and fashions and executives do what ever is in. They also do what they've done before and worked or what they are good at. Rarely do they do things because it makes sense in their organization's particular situation and circumstance.

We expect a physician to tailor a treatment to an individual's specific diagnostic but tolerate all sorts of organizations -- for-profit and nonprofit -- to ignore the facts and get away with a casual benchmarking approach.

Evidence-based management (EBM) is a way of thinking. It's being willing to act on the basis of what you know while doubting that so you can learn as you do. EBM involves treating organizations as unfinished prototypes, adopting an experimental mindset. It isn't new or original. Yet surprisingly Pfeffer's research shows that few organizations actually do it. Discover why and how to practice good evidence-based management in this presentation from the 2006 Nonprofit Institute convened by the Center for Social Innovation's publication, the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Our publication of this program was made possible by the support of the following:



 

 


Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1979.

Dr. Pfeffer has served on the faculties of the business schools at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley. During the 1981-1982 academic year he was the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and during 2006 he was a visiting Professor at the London Business School, Singapore Management University, and IESE. He currently serves on the board of directors of 1) SonoSite, a publicly traded company that develops hand-carried ultrasound equipment and 2) Audible Magic, a start-up developing music and advertising recognition technology and copyright protection products. Since, January, 2003, Pfeffer has written a monthly management column entitled “The Human Factor” for Business 2.0, a leading business magazine with a circulation of 650,000.

Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. in Administration and Management Science and his M.S. in Industrial Administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

From 1994-1996, Dr. Pfeffer served as Director of Executive Education, responsible for all of the Stanford business school's executive education activities. He has taught executive seminars in 28 countries including Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece, Israel, Turkey, South Africa, Canada, Brazil, and Mexico in addition to lecturing in management development programs and consulting for many companies, associations, and universities in the United States.

Dr. Pfeffer is a member and Fellow of the Academy of Management and a member of the Industrial Relations Research Association. He has won the Richard D. Irwin award for Scholarly Contributions to Management as well as several awards for books and articles.

 

Resources:

Pfeffer is the author or co-author of eleven books:

  • The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective
  • Organizational Design
  • Power in Organizations
  • Organizations and Organization Theory
  • Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations (translated into German, Dutch, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish and Portuguese)
  • Competitive Advantage Through People: Unleashing the Power of the Work Force (translated into Portuguese, Korean, Indonesian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish)
  • New Directions for Organization Theory: Problems and Prospects (translated into Spanish)
  • The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First (translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese)
  • The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (translated into Japanese, German, and Polish)
  • Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People (translated into Dutch, Japanese, and Korean)
  • Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management
  • The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer
  • Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management

This program is from our Stanford Discussions series.

For The Conversations Network:

  • Post-production audio engineer: Steven Ng
  • Website editor: Bernadette Clavier
  • Series producer: Bernadette Clavier