Why do we pay attention to business consultants/gurus?

Why do we hire famous management consultants to drop by and tell us how to run our business? And buy their books by the millions? Some recent articles annoyed me a little, though I'm not sure why. I've wondered before if my annoyance with management gurus results from either crankiness or envy, particularly in the case of Malcolm Gladwell (though I'm not alone, since I received plenty of emails from Evidence Soup readers skeptical of his claims after I covered some researchers who are producing evidence showing that the Tipping Point probably doesn't exist).

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal identified the most influential U.S. business thinkers/gurus (ranked based on Google search results, media mentions in LexisNexis, and academic citations -- read about their ranking methodology here). The Top 5 are Gary Hamel, Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Gates, and Howard Gardner. (Robert Reich was No. 6 -- one of my friends in grad school called him a "policy hustler". Heh.) WSJ published two articles: New Breed of Business Gurus Rises and also Quest for Innovation, Motivation Inspires the Gurus. At least they didn't imply that these guys are above criticism, describing one of them this way: "Gary Hamel, 53 years old, is a prolific writer and speaker who has kept his popularity despite falling victim to a peril of gurudom: His 2000 book, "Leading the Revolution," lionized Enron Corp. (The Enron case study was removed from later editions.)" Now some are chipping away at Friedman's world-is-flat theory, claiming that nationalism is interfering: "Governments, as the story goes, are reasserting their role in the lives of individuals and businesses, causing barriers to rise. If true, that trend counters a premise of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's popular book, The World Is Flat, that the Internet and other types of IT are wiping away national borders."

So. What is it that bugs me? I've read too many business books and sat through too many keynotes to critique them individually here. Generally speaking, though, I've found that the advice of many guru types exhibits these flaws:

• They're not specific enough, or comprehensive enough. A few well-phrased anecdotes don't cut it when providing prescriptive, actionable advice.
• I always suspect they chose their examples conveniently, preferring the ones that support their "frameworks" (a problematic bugaboo of qualitative research).
• Rarely do they expose what types of evidence they used, tell us what variables were considered, describe how they arrived at their conclusions, and let us critique their methodology.
• Seldom do they have accomplishments of their own to examine and draw from (Bill Gates and Carly Fiorina being notable exceptions).

How do they command those big bucks? Sometimes an event organizer wants a well-known keynote speaker; nothing wrong with that. Another explanation for the popularity of some of these gurus is that "People have a natural desire to look for some kind of framework or a way of explaining what's going on." Well, no sh*t. I'm thinking people would be better off if they enrolled in some philosophy, business, liberal arts, and public policy courses and came up with a framework for themselves. But I suppose it's tempting to simply pay for a spoon-fed framework that can be cited to colleagues at key moments in meetings... I can almost see them rolling their eyes from here. Woops, there I go again, being cranky.

Comments

[Tracy Allison Altman]

Chris, I have read the Halo Effect, and thought about mentioning it in my post yesterday. Rosenzweig does a fantastic job of debunking the "findings" in many bestselling (and some not-so-bestselling) business books.
And you're right, a recount of a successful business person's experience is anecdotal evidence, not research. But I'd prefer to read the nitty gritty detail of how an entrepreneur or executive tackled specific challenges than read another broad-based framework that is too general or obvious to tell me anything I don't already know. (One problem with that, of course, is that few of these folks sit down and write about all the mistakes they made.) I suppose my bias results from 1) My age and education -- been around the block enough times to have read lots of big-picture, here's-my-visionary-framework stuff; and 2) My own experience as a technology entrepreneur, which makes me much more interested in knowing "What did [insert name here] do in a similar situation?" than in hearing what Thomas Friedman would say about my particular challenge. Then I can decide for myself how (or if) their situations are analogous to mine, and what I can learn from their experience.

[chris]

Sounds like, if you haven't read it already, you'd get some comfort knowing you're not the only one skeptical of the gurus - Phil Rosenzweig's book, The Halo Effect.

The only point you make that I would push back on is the last. Sure, there is some value in personal experience - I'm not discounting that. But personal experience still falls under your first flaw - it's anecdotal. Would you rather take advice from someone who's been successful in one endeavor, or someone who's studied many hundreds of endeavors looking for what works? If their research is credible (I realize that can be a big "if"), I'd rather take the research.