“If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients and many more doctors would be in jail.”  

--Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management; Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton

Too much conventional wisdom is not wise at all.  Trite is not always true.  Why do managers believe the things they do?  Who says that the “best practices” are actually best?  What does the evidence say?  Great managers make great decisions.  But, how do they make them?  What role does evidence play in your decision making process?  What role SHOULD it play? Should you believe the management consultants and the popular authors?  Is what they are selling appropriate for your organization and your unique problems and competition?  What should you do when you have no evidence upon which to base your decisions?  This course is built upon the important work of Stanford Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton and their seminal book cited above.