The Halo Effect

I finished it, and it's the rare book that changes how you read other books. Rosenzweig's argument is simple and brutal: almost everything we believe about what makes companies great is contaminated by the halo effect. When a company is winning, every decision looks brilliant. When it struggles, the same decisions look reckless. Results reach backwards and rewrite what caused them. Then he takes the research behind Good to Great, In Search of Excellence and the whole genre apart, and what's presented as science turns out to be mostly successful companies describing themselves through success-colored glasses, in retrospective interviews and glowing press coverage. If you measure winners and losers with different yardsticks, no amount of statistics saves you. The studies are NOT junk science in the sense of faked numbers; they're junk science in the sense that the data can't answer the questions being asked.