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By Richard Puyt, on May 20th, 2010
 The airspace had just been closed over London Heatrow, due to the eruption of the vulcano under the Eyjafjallajökull glacier. This didn’t prevent me from meeting up with professor Briner. He is one of the founding fathers of the evidence-based management movement. We caught up at Borough Market in Londen. Among other things, he explains the second wave of evidence-based management movemenent. Continue reading Interview with Rob Briner
By Richard Puyt, on April 9th, 2010
 We may think we know what goes down well in the workplace. The trouble is there’s very little proof that it works. It is hard to argue with the suggestion that happy workers are more productive or that cutting stress at work will reduce absenteeism. And any job candidate who told an employer he couldn’t do his best work in a team would be unlikely to make the shortlist.
After all, employee engagement, stress reduction and the power of teamwork seem such good sense that few people stop to think further. There is only one problem. There is little or no evidence to back up any of these ideas. Continue reading Show me the evidence….
By Richard Puyt, on February 14th, 2010
 At the end of November of 2009, I received mail from Stanford. Jeffrey Pfeffer had returned after some extensive traveling and found the time to answer my four key questions. Here you can read his take on the current state of affairs of evidence based management. I’m always grateful if people take time out of in their busy schedules to help me out. Continue reading Jeffrey Pfeffer on the state of affairs of evidence-based management
By Richard Puyt, on February 9th, 2010
 The never ending debate on “real science” and “pseudo science”. In this short clip, Richard Feynman points out the ‘fallacies’ of social science research. From the point of view of the “exact” sciences like chemistry, physics or mathematics, the reasoning looks sound. However, from a science philosophy point of view, one could argue that even the great Richard Feynman is comparing apples and oranges. Social science and exact science have different merits. The nature of science is that it works of the principle of falsifiability (a term posed by Karl Popper). And in social sciences, there are no real ‘laws’ which can compare to exact sciences. However, and interesting clip to watch, since this topic seems to recure. Continue reading Richard Feynman’s skeptical view on social science
By Richard Puyt, on February 2nd, 2010
 In November 2009, I received a nice email from Miguel Olivas Lujan. He just became aware of this little blog and was kind enough to attach his article on evidence based management, which was not yet in my collection. Miguel is professor of administrative sciences at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. The article is titled Evidence Based Management: A Business Necessity for Hispanices which he published in The Business Journal for Hispanic research. Subscribers to this journal can read the whole article here. Non subscribers can send an email to Miguel for a personal copy. (this prevents any copyrights infringement on my part…). Since he wrote an article on evidence based management, I thought it would only be fair to ask him some fundamental questions on evidence based management.
Continue reading Miguel Olivas Lujan’s take on evidence-based management
By Richard Puyt, on January 31st, 2010
 Progress by the current school of thought of evidence based/informed decision making is slow, but steady. That’s the good news. One thing I’ve learned so far, is that evidence does not speak for itself. Contrary to evidence based medicine, random control tests (the golden standard in research) in management situations are difficult if not impossible. Achieving the highest level of evidence in general has to be ruled out. Evidence has to be appraised, which makes it subjective. It is all about the context, interpretation and the quality of the data. Bob Sutton was also musing on this in his posting on intuition vs. data driven decision making: some rough ideas. Our brains are primed on previous experiences. (That’s why we don’t need all the syllables in a sentence before we interpret what is being conveyed). We humans are pattern seeking animals. This has all kinds of evolutionary benefits (hence intuition, gut feeling, etc.), but also some major drawbacks. To put it mildly, we suck at judging facts. That’s the bad news. Continue reading Context is everything
By Richard Puyt, on January 29th, 2010
 Last year, I had pleasant email exchanges with Dennis Tourish (University of Kent) and Mark Learmonth (University of Nottingham). Dennis will join in the EBM debate later and Mark still defends his arguments against the emerging evidence based management movement. He also sent me a few articles. Since he published his short paper in ORGANIZATION, he has become a little milder. I’ve invited him to respond on the blog and share his current views with the rest of the readers.
After reading several publications, there are actually three questions which fascinate me about the evidence based management movement. Please share your thoughts in the comments or write your own posting.
1. What is the core idea and purpose of EBM? What would be the benefit for organizations and society as a whole if management would be based more on evidence?
2. What progress has the EBM movement currently been making? Is there evidence of evidence based management getting a foothold in organizations?
3. What is future for EBM in (research and practice)?
Readers who have written articles on evidence based management (published in academic journals or still in the process or otherwise), please share them with me. I’d like to make a repository with interesting articles on evidence based management.
By Richard Puyt, on January 24th, 2010
 Last summer I saw by chance a presentation by dr. Michael Shermer on TED.com (Technology, Entertainment, Design). Shermer presents himself a the founder of the Skeptic society and editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine. The Skeptic Society is a non-profit organisation, consisting of academics, scientists, historians, magicians and volunteers who are interested in reseaching and investigating controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas and the advancement of science. The mission of the Skeptic Society is to investigate controversial ideas and to reveal pseudo science. Everybody is invited to contribute. As Shermer says in his speech: We are the debunk squad of pseudo, voodoo, junk and bad science.
Continue reading The debunk squad of voodoo science
By Richard Puyt, on January 23rd, 2010
 In my exploratory search for the state of the art of the evidence based management movement, I stumbled on this short paper by dr. Mark Learmonth, Associate Professor in Organization Theory at the University of Nottingham. This is a must read for all the evidence based management enthusiasts. Maybe not always what you want to hear or read, but definitely food for thought on the freedom of conducting research and the politics which are involved in securing research grants and the pursuit of a academic career. Although, criticizing the EBM proponents by challenging their intellectual credibility does not make his case stronger.
Continue reading Food for thought: Mark Learmonth’s view on evidence-based management
By Richard Puyt, on January 22nd, 2010
 In an earlier post I pointed out that the science (or art) of management is still in the middle ages, where the alchemists still tell us they can change lead into gold. The underlying problem is that management is (not yet) perceived as a profession. But what is the definition of a profession? This morning I was searching for papers on this subject and found an interesting publication dealing with the same question (Khurana, Nohria, and Penrice; 2005). In order to establish if management is a profession and compare it to professions like law and medicine, these authors choose four criteria.
- a common body of knowledge resting on a well-developed, widely accepted theoretical base;
- a system for certifying that individuals possess such knowledge before being licensed or otherwise allowed to practice;
- a commitment to use specialized knowledge for the public good, and a renunciation of the goal of profit maximization, in return for professional autonomy and monopoly power;
- a code of ethics, with provisions for monitoring individual compliance with the code and a system of sanctions for enforcing it.
Continue reading Is business management a profession?
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