People and organizations continually strive to achieve effective action. But they do not have to do so in isolation. Available to them, especially on non-routine issues of great importance, is a broad array of advice from executives, change consultants, and academics. This is especially true on topics having to do with organizational learning, transformational change, and employee commitment. Much of this advice is appealing; much of it compelling, and providing it has become big business in its own right. The only problem is, most of it does not work — that is, most of it is not actionable. I ... More

People and organizations continually strive to achieve effective action. But they do not have to do so in isolation. Available to them, especially on non-routine issues of great importance, is a broad array of advice from executives, change consultants, and academics. This is especially true on topics having to do with organizational learning, transformational change, and employee commitment. Much of this advice is appealing; much of it compelling, and providing it has become big business in its own right. The only problem is, most of it does not work — that is, most of it is not actionable. It is simply too full of abstract claims, inconsistencies, and logical gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for concrete actions in concrete settings. This book examines why and how most professional advice on non-routine issues continues to fail. It looks with great care at a limited number of representative examples, drawn from the author's review of more than one hundred books and countless articles. It then places all this material in the context of a different theory of effective action — one that leads not to skilled incompetence, but to specific predictions that can be tested in real life.