Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths & Total Nonsense

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer takes aim at many of the management fads of the last 20 years - not individually, but as a group. It critiques the anecdotal approach used by many management gurus and finds it lacking. It points out that in many cases a management technique might be present in a successful company, but also present in a large number of failing companies, and many (most?) management authors only present one half of the equation.

"Hard Facts" doesn't give any easy solutions to this problem. It suggests that every company is unique, and that it's always a good idea to run some sort of internal pilot to validate a new management approach.

This isn't a great book, but you might find it very useful if you're trying to critique the management fad du jour at your company.