The study results put an interesting twist on it.

David,
I think that last topic is worth of an entire post. Can I look for it on Photoncourier?!

A while back I posted saying Michael Crichton was in error. Now when I receive the Acton Institute, the Catholic approach to captialism and free markets, the booklet states “father of the techno-thriller,” Harvard M.D. and winner of an Emmy, a Peabody, and Writer’s Guild of America …ER. Crichton has recently given his voice to the debate on environmentalism, declaring that “…the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens ofmillions of poor people, mostly children…” While the institute has criticized the ban from a moral point of view, Crichton does so on the basis of science.” Does Dr. Crichton practice medicine, science or writing thrillers and novels? When you said eyes and ears, what happened to your other senses, and then some? What would this say about the Institute and have you ever read any studies about DDT through the ecosystem or know the dynamics of ecological thinking?

There are many “red state / blue state” topics among managers. And you can make businesspeople just as angry questioning their business beliefs as you can discussing their knee jerk views on gun control or George W. Bush.

Many managers tend to have too much allegiance to the function in which they came up: ie, a general manager who grew up in sales may still tend to be biased in favor of a sales viewpoint, even though he now is responsible for sales, engineering, manufacturing, etc…and similarly with a GM who grew up in engineering.

This preference is likely to be reinforced…the former sales VP who is now business unit GM finds that the new sales VP tends to agree with him, so he likes that VP more, which in turn predisposes him toward still more agreement with that particular individual….

Now I wonder if that would carry over to business decisions. I think it would be less common because business people and decisions don’t usually fall into such sharp ideological divisons. Knowing how someone thinks on one political issue can frequently predict where they stand on many other issues. I’m not sure it happens to the same degree in business.

The fact is managers go from recognizing something needs to change to changing something faster than they should. It’s an by-product of the pace of business combined with the fact that 90% of all managers don’t keep track of the results of their decisions and the path they took to land on their decision.

Toyota found that it was best to do a search for root causes to solve pRoblems faster and avoid a long chain of do-overs.

I suspect that it’s more idea-related than people-related.