RecipesforSuccess?
Organizational performance and management are complex subjects to research. The same goes for managing the legal function. In the everyday life of organizations, a million factors continuously interact.
Isolating factors and measuring their impact on (parts of) the performance of organizations is extremely difficult. Many management books and gurus promise simple recipes for success, sometimes marketed with claims that research has proven their effectiveness. In reality, there is little hard evidence on “what really works” with regard to organizational performance. A lot of management research that does claim to have found simple recipes for success can be questioned methodologically. Few describe the flaws of a substantial amount of management and business research better than Phil Rosenzweig in “The Halo Effect, or how managers let themselves be deceived”.[192] Rosenzweig’s central point is that a lot of business research is “pseudoscience” because it uses material of a subjective nature as a basis, such as articles from newspapers, popular business journals and interviews with managers and professionals. In essence, these sources are all subjective and susceptible to the halo effect. The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression of an entity influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that entity’s character or properties. With regard to businesses, this will mean that an observer judges all or many aspects of an organization as good, or even excellent, because the organization’s overall results are good. In reality, organizations will often have good overall results in spite of flawed strategies or policies on aspects. If the input for a study is contaminated by the halo effect, it does not matter how impressive and sophisticated the analytical methods are used to analyze.Rosenzweig gives many examples where successful companies are described as having an excellent strategy or HR policy 1 year, while the unchanged strategy or policy is fiercely criticized the next year, only because overall results have changed. The impact of the halo effect is profound and happens subconsciously. Even some of the most famous books and articles on management suffer from the defect that Rosenzweig illuminates.
Apart from using a “garbage in-garbage out” methodology, management books and business research can also cloak a limited understanding by using vague and ambiguous terms. Rosenzweig quotes physicist Richard Feynman, stating that many fields have a tendency for pomposity, dressing up issues that are not fully understood with complicated-sounding terms. With regard to a particular philosopher, Feynman remarked:
It isn't the philosophy that gets me, it's the pomposity. If they'd just laugh at themselves! If they'd just say, “I think it's like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he had a good shot at it, too.
Business and management science too seldom demonstrate the relativization that Feynman recommends here, and no field, legal management being no exception, is immune to pomposity. It is good practice to always keep this lesson in mind, especially when reading publications and research that also serve marketing purposes.
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