The Halo Effect

Just started this one, so treat everything here as provisional. Phil Rosenzweig's pitch is that most celebrated business research is contaminated by the halo effect: we judge everything a company does through the glow of its results. If a company is winning, every decision looks brilliant; the moment it struggles, the same decisions look reckless. The book takes apart the methodology behind Good to Great, In Search of Excellence, and their whole genre, showing that much of what they present as causal principles is just successful companies being described through success-colored glasses. That hits home because I rated Good to Great and Built to Last S tier on this very site, so I'm reading this as much as a stress test of my own shelf as anything else. Early chapters are sharp and I'm enjoying the contrarian punch. I'll update once I'm done.