French Hard Facts Takes the Biscuit!

This was the headline on an email that I got from Geoff Staines last week.  Geoff works for Vuibert, the publisher of our French translation of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (And the French translation of The No Asshole Rule too, Objectif Zéro-sale-con). He wrote Jeff Pfeffer and me last week to report that “Faits et Foutaises dans le management” had won an award last week in Paris called called “Prix du livre Ressources Humaines.” Apparently, this is an award for the best business book published in France during the past year.
 
Geoff (who is British, but has lived in France for many years) wrote:

  “This is the eighth year the prize has been awarded; the three sponsors are the HR Chair of "Sciences Po", France's prestigious political science school, Le Monde, the national daily newspaper of reference, and a feisty headhunter called Syntec. The jury of twelve good men and women was made up of HR Directors from the private and public sector, professors from Sciences Po, and journalists from the Le Monde business and economics section. Sixty titles were originally selected and whittled down to three finalists. Main criteria were originality and relevance of the subject-matter, research-based propositions, quality of writing and pedagogy, and applicability.
        
About three hundred people attended the ceremony in Le Monde's offices.The jury loved the breath of coverage of your book, the fact-based examples and what they called your unassuming, non-dogmatic style, and chose it as a fine instance of university-based writing for the general reader. The president of the jury read out a couple of juicy bits, and all the copies that were discreetly on sale afterwards went quite fast. Champagne flowed, as it always does at the drop of a hat, the munchies were so good people stayed late, and there was a very good overall atmosphere. I have been doing these things for yonks, and this event stood out.”

I love his description – especially that word “yonks.”
        
Jeff Pfeffer and I are delighted with the news and even more delighted that the notion of evidence-based management continues to spread and have impact.  If you are interested in learning more about evidence-based management, Jeff Pfeffer and I maintain a website, www.evidence-basedmanagement.com. And we thank the panel of judges, Le Monde and Syntec for the award. We are honored and would like to thank everyone at Vuibert for their good work.

Comments

[Diego Rodriguez]

Congratulations to you and Jeff. Assholes aside, "Hard Facts" is the book I keep going back to for more...

[Kevin Rutkowski]

Congratulations! I found the information in this book to be both inspiring and useful. I'm glad to see it get recognized in a big way.

(However, you did state that it's an award for the best business book published "during the past week". I hope it's really for the past year; otherwise, it's not quite as impressive.) ;)

[Joseph Logan]

Congratulations Bob! For what it's worth, I wholeheartedly agree that the book is a valuable contribution to the field of management. One would think that basing management on evidence would be so obvious as to be intuitive, but your book capably explains why this hasn't been the case and what to do about it. Bravo!