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Early this year, I wrote a post on the notion that there absolutely are dumb ideas. The gist of the post was: get over it. If you don't have a bunch of bad ideas to sift through, then you haven't given yourself permission to actually try to think creatively about how you or your organization can innovate. I was saying bad ideas or ok, as long as you find some good ones to work on.

Now Shankar Vedatam from the Washington Post hits again on an insightful idea in his "Department of Human Behavior" column. He explores how bad ideas get rolling and develop lives of their own. His quote from Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University and the author of the book Irrational Exuberance, really made me think (sorry, don't know if the quote is from an interview or from the book):

"I am talking of views that seem intuitively right," Shiller said. "One hears other people saying things and confirming ideas you have. When things are commonly accepted, you file it in your brain as something that is true."

So here's the can of worms I'm opening today... I read this and I think about 7 Measures.

Now, assuming I still have a job after others in the organization read that, let me explain.

At one of the Great Ideas sessions I was at, the presenter made a point from Jim Collins’ Good to Great. I have no problem quoting from the lessons in that book. But the presenter praised the meticulous research of Collins for the purpose of underscoring how unapproachable and irrefutable the lesson is.

I encourage anybody who has ever read Built to Last, Good to Great, In Search of Excellence, 7 Measures of Success, or any of those books that study what really successful companies do right to read Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers.

Rosenzweig’s argument in a nutshell—the research, while time-consuming, isn’t objective. Yes, it uses objective data to determine if an organization is successful, but when it comes to picking out the qualities of why they are successful, the research is much more subjective, relying in large part on interviews and press accounts. This may come as a huge shock, but people tend to talk favorably about successful companies, workers tend to be happier, and executives win awards and give well-thought-of speeches.

As Rosenzweig says, this doesn’t disprove the points that Collins makes or the measures uncovered in 7 Measures. It does, however, take them off the “indisputable” shelf. As a general rule, whenever anything is indisputable, I’d say be skeptical. It could very well be that following the tenants in Good to Great or 7 Measures or whatever management consultant/guru of the week espouses would be disastrous for your organization. Remember, Taylor’s scientific management was once common sense, too. I think a lot of good can be derived from Collins and 7 Measures, but success will always be more art than science. No step-by-step prescription or program will get you where you want to go. Try, feel, react, try, feel, react… that’s how to move forward.