When Business Cases Teach the Wrong Lessons
Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his great book “The 7 Rules of Power” declares that “success excuses (almost) everything.” Success also determines which stories about the origins of that success get told and which headlines are buried. This makes it all but impossible to know the real causes for why things worked out the way they did, inhibiting learning.
On learning, case studies and missing information
Human learning is like the scientific method. It requires us to assert a hypothesis, which can be formal or not, conduct an experiment, and see if what we thought would happen happened. We can then adjust our hypothesis to reflect the new facts we have hopefully uncovered.
Here’s the problem with a lot of our learning in business — it often takes the form of stories and case studies, which themselves are subject to what Phil Rosenzweig famously dubbed “The Halo Effect.” In other words, we’re not told the whole story, and so we make inferences about causality without really knowing what happened.
Let’s revisit one of the most famous “cases” of corporate decline, the long, sad story of Kodak.
