Book Review: The Halo Effect

If you’ve found yourself staggering starry-eyed looking for excellence or at least a chasm you can cross before the end of the quarter, this book should help. It’s a good, hard slap upside the head, and a great antidote for anyone who has been reading too many business books.

Phil Rosenzweig takes the most sacred business texts of the last 20 years out to the backyard and hits them repeatedly with a big, hard stick until they confess to, well, not much at all.

He skewers In Search of Excellence and Good to Great, among others, for perpetuating the multiple myths of success in business.

Rosenzweig walks us through the portrait gallery of heroes and heels including WHSmith, Lego, Nokia and Intel with longer side trips to Cisco and ABB, before unloading the nine delusions that keep business authors employed and managers chasing their tails.

The title delusion, the Halo Effect, is the one most of us have had thrown at our heads by our masters when we slip behind a competitor. This delusion confuses the attributes of a successful company with the things that got it there in the first place. In other words, does the foosball table in the lunchroom make more creative engineers or does having great products allow you to be a cool and enlightened employer?

Many of the other delusions have to do with academic laziness and ex-post facto simplifications of complex and unpredictable factors. Rosenzweig, an accomplished academic himself, has a very good time stomping on the data and questionable analytics of What Really Works, Built to Last and In Search of Excellence.

And while he will give these books their due as compelling stories he’s all in favour of shelving them in the same aisle as The Miracle Rhubarb and Pop Tarts Weight Loss Plan.  He has found the “principal fiction at the heart of so many business books– that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.”

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams,
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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