Jeff Pfeffer’s new book, What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management, lives up to its subtitle. Fellow Stanford professor Robert Sutton raves about the book in his recent blog post (he admits that his opinion is slightly biased) and highlights a few interesting points. Sutton says:
Jeff shows how increasing numbers of companies are placing a larger burden on employees to choose among multiple insurance plans, to choose among dozens or hundreds of options of spending retirement savings, and to devote increasing numbers of hours to doing the work required to receive these benefits. [...] Jeff wonders why so many organizations require so many skilled and highly paid workers to do work that they don’t know how to do well and, in many cases, could be done more quickly and cheaply by specialists.
Pfeffer also recommends less transparency for CEO salaries. He believes that making this information public leads to the corporate version of Lake Wobegon, where all the CEOs are above average, or believe they are, and therefore demand higher salaries to keep up with other CEOs. Keeping that information private would force companies to award executive compensation according to the company’s internal standards.
