Evidence-Based Management

Evidence-based management entails managerial decisions and organizational practices informed by the best available scientific evidence. It’s an emerging movement to explicitly use the current, best evidence in management decision-making. Recent studies show that only about 15 percent of their decisions are evidence based. In the article Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, they make the comparison of business management to its counterparts in medicine and education. Managers are actually more ignorant than doctors about which prescriptions are reliable and they’re less eager to find out. If doctors were as reckless as some managers in practicing management, there would (without a question) more unnecessarily sick or dead patients. There is a lack of accountability and legal responsibility on behalf of business managers in the business realm than in the medical field. If both disciplines were unequivocally alike, then more managers would be in jail or suffering other penalties from mal-practice.

The article then takes the effort to clear up common misconceptions in the business world. One is which when people are overly influences by ideology, they often fail to question whether a practice will work. Being an effective business manger requires years of rehearsal and preparation with practical experience. Some techniques are just not listed within a textbook and would expect an individual to experience it first-hand to understand the details. Then after the occurrence, managers will be able to reflect back and hone in the weak areas to prevent the same situation to happen twice. Management is analogous to medicine as it will be a continuous process of refined practice and experience.

One factor that the article point out that complicates evidence based management is that there can be too much evidence applied to a particular situation. For instance, Business: The Ultimate Resource weighs a whopping eight pounds and includes over 2000 pages! Who in their right mind is going to purchase this oversized document, not to mention expensive, and expect their employees to read it? I’m currently reading the 5th discipline and that textbook runs over 400 pages. It’s a tough book to get through and will probably take me at least two readings for all the material covered to sink in. I don’t think most people in business to have an ample amount of time engage themselves in difficult to read book.