Pfeffer at His Best: What Were They Thinking?

If you want to read something wonderful from one of our great organizational theorists, I urge you to buy Jeff Pfeffer’s brand new book What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management.

This is a completely biased opinion. I have written two books with Jeff and numerous articles, and we are close friends. But let’s start with my claim that Jeff is one of our greatest organizational theorists.  For my tastes, our three greatest living academic organizational theorists are, in my opinion, The University of Michigan’s Karl Weick, Stanford’s (now retired) James March, and Jeff Pfeffer. When I say “academic,” I mean scholars who have contributed important theories and published extensively in peer reviewed academic journals. If you look at the work of any organizational theorist who has ever lived, no one except for perhaps Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon exceeds the breadth and depth of Jeff’s contributions.

I invite you to look at Jeff’s record; here is a link to his academic vita. Note that Jeff has published 13 books and over 150 articles and chapters. These often landmark publications are on a remarkably wide range of topics including power and politics, demography, wage differences, joint ventures, organizational size, leadership, job design, the person-situation debate, human resource management practices, performance metrics, economics, and his most recent work on “time as money.”  He has won virtually every award that the field has to offer and keeps cranking articles and books out, and now at 60  years old, he isn’t slowing down.  I have always especially been impressed by the degree to which Jeff treats (and talks about) research as a social process. One of the keys to Jeff’s success is that he works so well with so many co-authors. He has had over 40 different co-authors and he is so good to work with that few of us end-up writing just one paper with Jeff.  This is quite a feat given that an academic article can easily take several years to complete (my last academic paper with Jeff took about four years from the first brainstorming session to publication) and a book can take even longer.

What distinguishes Jeff from other star academic organizational theorists, however, is that he uses so much of this academic knowledge to influence what organizations and their managers actually do. Jeff isn’t as well known in managerial circles as Peter Drucker or Jim Collins.  But I believe that his work should be as well-known because his ideas are so research-based and so practical. And unlike most star academics in his field, Jeff is deeply immersed in the stuff of organizational life. Jeff is on the boards of two companies and has been on several others; and unlike some “wimpy” academics on boards, Jeff is very active. One day, as we were going to lunch, I asked him how his day was going: He replied that he had just fired his first CEO! He was the one the board appointed to do it. Jeff has presented his ideas to hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of managers over the years, and is constantly writing articles and books that blend his deep academic knowledge with his remarkable understanding of the practical demands faced by real managers and leaders.

Jeff is most useful – and most fun to listen to – when he starts ranting about some managerial or organizational problem. He is funny, irreverent, and has no compunction about biting the hands that feed him (e.g., Jeff makes a compelling case against the value of MBA education – something that he does, in part, for a living).   And no matter how strongly you disagree with him, he has this annoying habit of basing his arguments on the best theory and evidence in peer-reviewed academic publications. Plus when he writes about an unstudied topic, his logic is often so compelling that refuting his arguments is extremely difficult. I have, unfortunately, been on the wrong side of hundreds of arguments with Jeff over the years – so I speak from experience. This is partly because I disagree with many of his opinions, and partly because our motto is “the more we fight, the better we write.”  So even if we seem to be agreeing about something, we often argue about anyway to challenge our assumptions and develop our logic.

Now, let’s return to Jeff’s new book, What Were They Thinking. I just got my copy in the mail from Amazon yesterday, and read it for the third time. Every time I start to read this book, I end-up devoting a couple hours to the thing, re-reading it from start to finish.  It contains one compelling rant after another. These essays are organized into sections on “People Centered Strategies,” “Creating Effective Workplaces,” “Power Play” (also see Jeff’s classic and standard MBA text for classes on organizational power and politics Managing With Power), “Measures of Success,” and “Facing the Nation” (On organizations and public policy).

You will be taken by each of the 28 essays in this book, and if you are like me, you won’t be able to choose a favorite. To give you a taste, however, consider Chapter 8, called “Let Workers Work.” 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 than goes through case after case to show how much time employees are expected to devote to figuring out and using their benefits. Jeff points out that this trend is spreading even though the logic of the modern organization is based on the concepts of the division of labor and specialization. Yet, in direct defiance of such logic, one organization after another (including Stanford University) is asking employees to spend more and more time dealing with their benefits in order to save some short-term administrative costs. 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.

Or, if you want to read an annoying and well-crafted argument, check out Chapter 27 on “What to Do – and Not Do – About Executive Compensation.” Pfeffer calls for less transparency about CEO pay. He argues that one of the main things that drive up CEO pay is that every human-being thinks of him or herself as “above average.” He shows how making CEO salaries public helps ratchet up pay because most boards and most CEOs like to think of themselves as superior people who associate with other, similarly superior humans. So, every year, companies keep raising CEO salaries to support this illusion that they are “better than the rest” (an illusion largely unaffected by poor performance – humans are remarkably skilled at rationalizing away poor performance). 

Jeff makes the counter-intuitive, but theory-based, argument that if boards and CEOs couldn’t engage in social comparison because they had no information or had only unreliable information about other companies, this ratcheting process would be short-circuited. Pay levels might go down because boards would instead focus on equity within companies and would be more likely to be offended by outrageous numbers.  This is classic Pfeffer: Annoying, research-based, and quite possibly right.

If you want to read something by one of the greatest organizational theorists, if you want to be entertained, if you want to confront some good ideas that will make you squirm, and that might just cause you to change how you manage for the better, What Were They Thinking? is the book for you. Or at least that is my deeply biased opinion.

Comments

[Gretchen Rubin]

Okay, say no more. I'm off to Amazon to order my copy. I loved your book THE NO ASSHOLE RULE, and if you have such nice things to say about WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?, that's good enough for me.