The Find: A slick manager who sounds smart may seem like a good thing for a business, but Bob Sutton warns that a boss with extremely good BSing skills can actually be more harm than help to an organization.- The Source: Stanford professor and management guru Sutton writing on his Work Matters blog.
The Takeaway: Like it or not, BS is common part of business life, and in many cases it seems harmless. Who cares if a manager likes the sound of their voice a little too much as long as he (or she) gets results? But Sutton argues in his thought-proving blog post that high flown words can actually impede the implementation of real change on the ground. He explains the danger of BS:
There are too many times in organizations when executives, managers, and other people say smart things instead of doing smart things, and somehow after they have said all the right things, they feel so much better that they believe no other action is necessary or somehow their magical words will turn into action without having to do anything else. Another variation is when bosses do seemingly brilliant talk, talk that they believe is brilliant too, and then — because they don’t know what they are talking about — people either resist turning it into action or, when they try, it turns out to be impossible
He also offers a corollary to the notion that smart sounding ideas often lead to dumb actions – dumb sounding ideas are often successful. To illustrate the point he tells the story of an educational software company who brainstormed the worst possible product they could produce as a thought experiment only to be shocked when something very similar to their idea was a big success for a competitor a few years later.
The Question: In your experience, is it true that organizations often expend more energy laying out smart plans than implementing them?
(Image of shaggy bull by Brian Forbes, CC 2.0)
