What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management

School Administrator, May, 2008 by Lane B. Mills

What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 2007, 241 pp., $25 hardcover

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Based on the "What Works" columns that author Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote for Business 2.0 magazine, What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Manage. merit is a great way for education leaders to learn from the mistakes of others and rethink their own leadership and management issues in unique ways.

The book is organized into five major sections on topics such as creating effective workplaces and measuring success, with multiple cases for each. While some cases are more relevant to the business sector, the majority are applicable to running a school or district.

Pfeffer focuses on three themes throughout each chapter as a way of unifying his ideas and explaining the poor choices of the companies featured in the cases: (1) the importance of considering feedback effects (the unintended consequences of actions); (2) the naive, overly simplistic models of people and organizations; and (3) the tendency to overcomplicate what are often reasonably straightforward choices and options.

As the title suggests, reading about some of the decisions that companies made will have you scratching your head in wonder and asking how a leader could not have seen the train wreck that would result.

The book will sometimes provide a chuckle or a silent prayer to not let it be you that makes it into the next edition of this great book. Fit for current and future education leaders, the text would be a great source for conversation and analysis of current organizational practices in a group or individual setting.

Reviewed by Lane B. Mills, associate professor of educational leadership, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.