Practitioners and scholars agree that businesses in the coming millennium will be managed differently than firms of the 20th century. And getting there from here, according to today's best advice, will require creative change. In this pioneering work, Argyris, one of the world's leading organizational thinkers, reviews a wide array of business advice from the best and brightest thinkers and consultants and concludes that as appealing as their ideas may be, most of them are simply not workable. They are too furl of abstract claims, logical gaps, and inconsistencies, to be useful. And ironically, even when their recommendations are implemented correctly, the result is often failure. Why do these gaps in logic exist, and how can they be more effectively discovered? Applying a disciplined critique to numerous representative examples of advice about readership, teaming, change, and employee commitment, Argyris shows readers how to be more critical of the advice they are given, how to team new approaches for appraising employee performance, and how to generate an internal commitment to values and better strategy.

In our ever expanding global market, innovative business advice is at a premium, and giving this advice has become a lucrative industry in and of itself. This book provides the critical lens necessary to evaluate which advice is best for your organization.