Nicholas Bloom: evaluation

Transcript context

…You go to the history section — most of the books are at least pretty good. Yeah. One issue that struck me — why I got into management in the first place — just to explain what I’ve been doing for years, I’ve been working with a huge coalition of people. I mentioned Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, Renata Lemos, Daniela Scur, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster. There’s a huge group of us that have been trying to measure management practices across firms and countries — just very methodically and, in some ways, very boringly. Oh, we must have surveyed several million organizations by now to create a big dataset. We take populations of firms, run these surveys, collect data, and compare them. Most of the books that I read that are popular — Good to Great and Built to Last and things like these — are generally based on individual anecdotes and case studies, and I think that’s great for teaching. I use case studies in the Harvard Business School all the time to teach because it’s very inspirational. [laughs] They’re always positive stories of how Mrs. X or Mr. Y turned the firm around, but they’re not great for research. The reason is, I know from past experience, having to write one case study. I wrote a case study on a firm that was owned by someone that was in my Stanford MBA course called Gokaldas, and it’s called The Challenge of Change. The problem was, we wrote this case study — it was a fascinating company that actually eventually got taken over by a private equity in India. They were a huge, very successful apparel firm. We had to get legal sign-off from everyone involved. We interviewed six or seven people, and they all had to legally sign off and say they were fine with us using the material. You can imagine what that does for selection effects. It means that, basically, these books — it’s very hard for them to get proper information on firms that do badly because they refuse. They threaten lawsuits. I think a lot of management research is correct. Most of these books are probably saying the right thing. The problem is that every story you want to come up with, every theory, there’s a book supporting it. It’s kind of hard to know where to look. What we really need, ideally, is what we’re trying to build. I wouldn’t say it’s our research, but more our data that, hopefully, people will use — because it’s publicly available data — to say, “Look, here are five hypotheses of management. Is there support in large-scale data?” I think that will put more discipline on it and, therefore, put more credibility on these books. If teaching management techniques to companies is so effective, can we expect similarly large gains teaching personal productivity techniques to individuals who, if anything, should absorb it more rapidly, right? No collective action problem. But it seems, overall, self-help books, life coaching — they seem pretty ineffective. How do we square that larger picture?…

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