What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management.

What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management. By Jeffrey Pfeffer. Harvard Business School Press, 241 pages. $25.

There's a beguiling central theme to this book: conventional management wisdom is frequently all wet. Author Pfeffer, a longtime professor at Stanford Business School and author or co-author of a number of management books, cogently and succinctly dissects a lot of common thinking about management strategies and finds it wanting.

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In a chapter entitled "Stop Picking Employees' Pockets," for instance, he examines the time-honored concept of cutting wages and hours to trim labor costs. A key problem, he writes, is that labor costs don't necessarily correlate with labor rates--and that "a fixation on labor costs diverts management's attention from other aspects of operations that might provide even more leverage." Moreover, the resulting alienation of employees sends all the wrong signals about worker retention and the company being a desirable place to work.

In another example, Pfeffer tackles the seemingly inexorable movement toward eliminating defined-benefit plans and asking employees to take on more responsibility for their retirement and health costs. This violates theory going back to Adam Smith about the importance of specialization in the workplace, he says, and may force workers to manage these issues during the workday--hurting productivity. Not surprisingly, he finds that companies that provide generous benefits (including pensions) remain highly attractive to potential employees.

Altogether, Pfeffer offers 28 short and well-crafted chapters looking at various management practices and what's wrong with them. While a book like this won't revolutionize the management world (no one book ever could), it's a marvelously contrarian look at ideas that just might need a fresh eye.