Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior from Stanford University is giving a lecture at CBS Executive

It is an honor to have Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior Stanford University at CBS Executive for a lecture on:

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management

You might think that in a world in which there is intense and increasing competition that organizational leaders would try to use the best facts, evidence, and ideas on which to base their decisions.

You would be wrong.

Many organizational decisions are based on belief and ideology, on casual benchmarking of what other organizations are doing, and on what organizational leaders think has worked for them in the past. But making decisions based on the evidence -- something that is now considered essential in medicine--actually can enhance the performance of other organizations as well.

We will discuss what "evidence-based management" is, why it is less common than what one might expect, and some "dangerous half-truths" that bedevil organizations.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1979.  He is the author or co-author of ten books:

1. The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective,

2. Organizational Design,

3. Power in Organizations,

4. Organizations and Organization Theory,

5. Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations (translated into German, Dutch, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish and Portuguese),

6. Competitive Advantage Through People: Unleashing the Power of the Work Force (translated into Portuguese, Korean, Indonesian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish),

7. New Directions for Organization Theory:  Problems and Prospects (translated into Spanish),

8. The Human Equation:  Building Profits by Putting People First (translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese),

9. The Knowing-Doing Gap:  How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (translated into Japanese, German, and Polish), and

10. Hidden Value:  How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People (translated into Dutch, Japanese, and Korean). 

He has also published more than 110 articles and book chapters. 

His most recent book, co-authored with Robert Sutton,

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management will be published in 2006 by Harvard Business School Press.

Dr. Pfeffer has served on the faculties of the business schools at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley.  During the 1981-1982 academic year he was the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. 

Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. in Administration and Management Science and his M.S. in Industrial Administration from Carnegie-Mellon University.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

From 1994-1996, Dr. Pfeffer served as Director of Executive Education, responsible for all of the Stanford business school's executive education activities.  He has taught executive seminars in 27 countries in addition to lecturing in management development programs and consulting for many companies, associations, and universities in the United States.

Dr. Pfeffer is a member and Fellow of the Academy of Management and a member of the Industrial Relations Research Association. 

He has won the Richard D. Irwin award for Scholarly Contributions to Management as well as several awards for books and articles.

You will find more information about Dr. Pfeffer at

http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/pfeffer/