Here is a sidebar to a classic article, Evidence-Based Management (2006), co-authored by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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You may well be trying to bring the best evidence to bear on your decisions. You follow the business press, buy business books, hire consultants, and attend seminars featuring business experts. But evidence-based management is still hard to apply. Here’s what you’re up against.

There’s too much evidence.

With hundreds of English-language magazines and journals devoted to business and management issues, dozens of business newspapers, roughly 30,000 business books in print and thousands more being published each year, and the Web-based outlets for business knowledge continuing to expand (ranging from online versions of Fortune and the Wall Street Journal to specialized sites like Hr.com and Gantthead.com), it is fair to say that there is simply too much information for any manager to consume. Moreover, recommendations about management practice are seldom integrated in a way that makes them accessible or memorable. Consider, for instance, Business: The Ultimate Resource, a tome that weighs about eight pounds and runs 2,208 oversize pages. Business claims that it “will become the ‘operating system’ for any organization or anyone in business.” But a good operating system fits together in a seamless and logical manner—not the case here or with any such encyclopedic effort to date.

There’s not enough good evidence.

Despite the existence of “data, data everywhere,” managers still find themselves parched for reliable guidance. In 1993, senior Bain consultant Darrell Rigby began conducting the only survey we have encountered on the use and persistence of various management tools and techniques. (Findings from the most recent version of Bain’s Management Tools survey were published in Strategy and Leadership in 2005.) Rigby told us it struck him as odd that you could get good information on products such as toothpaste and cereal but almost no information about interventions that companies were spending millions of dollars to implement. Even the Bain survey, noteworthy as it is, measures only the degree to which the different programs are used and does not go beyond subjective assessments of their value.

The evidence doesn’t quite apply.

Often, managers are confronted with half-truths—advice that is true some of the time, under certain conditions. Take, for example, the controversy around stock options. The evidence suggests that, in general, heavier reliance on stock options does not increase a firm’s performance, but it does increase the chances that a company will need to restate its earnings. However, in small, privately held start-ups, options do appear to be relevant to success and less likely to produce false hype. One hallmark of solid research is conservatism—the carefulness of the researcher to point out the specific context in which intervention A led to outcome B. Unfortunately, that leaves managers wondering if the research could possibly be relevant to them.

People are trying to mislead you.

Because it’s so hard to distinguish good advice from bad, managers are constantly enticed to believe in and implement flawed business practices. A big part of the problem is consultants, who are always rewarded for getting work, only sometimes rewarded for doing good work, and hardly ever rewarded for evaluating whether they have actually improved things. Worst of all, if a client’s problems are only partly solved, that leads to more work for the consulting firm! (If you think our charge is too harsh, ask the people at your favorite consulting firm what evidence they have that their advice or techniques actually work—and pay attention to the evidence they offer.)

You are trying to mislead you.

Simon and Garfunkel were right when they sang, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Many practitioners and their advisers routinely ignore evidence about management practices that clashes with their beliefs and ideologies, and their own observations are contaminated by what they expect to see. This is especially dangerous because some theories can become self-fulfilling—that is, we sometimes perpetuate our pet theories with our own actions. If we expect people to be untrustworthy, for example, we will closely monitor their behavior, which makes it impossible to develop trust. (Meanwhile, experimental evidence shows that when people are placed in situations where authority figures expect them to cheat, more of them do, in fact, cheat.)

The side effects outweigh the cure.

Sometimes, evidence points clearly to a cure, but the effects of the cure are too narrowly considered. One of our favorite examples comes from outside management, in the controversy over social promotion in public schools—that is, advancing a child to the next grade even if his or her work isn’t up to par. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton represented the views of many when, in his 1999 State of the Union address, he said, “We do our children no favors when we allow them to pass from grade to grade without mastering the material.” President George W. Bush holds the same view. But this belief is contrary to the results from over 55 published studies that demonstrate the net negative effects of ending social promotion (versus no careful studies that find positive effects). Many school systems that have tried to end the practice have quickly discovered the fly in the ointment: Holding students back leaves schools crowded with older students, and costs skyrocket as more teachers and other resources are needed because the average student spends more years in school. The flunked kids also consistently come out worse in the end, with lower test scores and higher drop-out rates. There are also reports that bullying increases: Those flunked kids, bigger than their classmates, are mad about being held back, and the teachers have trouble maintaining control in the larger classes.

Stories are more persuasive, anyway.

It’s hard to remain devoted to the task of building bulletproof, evidence-based cases for action when it’s clear that good storytelling often carries the day. And indeed, we reject the notion that only quantitative data should qualify as evidence. As Einstein put it, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” When used correctly, stories and cases are powerful tools for building management knowledge. Many quantitative studies are published on developing new products, but few come close to Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer-winning Soul of a New Machine in capturing how engineers develop products and how managers can enhance or undermine the engineers’ (and products’) success. Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball is the most charming and useful book on corporate creativity we know. Good stories have their place in an evidence-based world, in suggesting hypotheses, augmenting other (often quantitative) research, and rallying people who will be affected by a change.

Still, it makes sense that when managers act on better logic and evidence, their companies will trump the competition. That is why we’ve spent our entire research careers, especially the last five years, working to develop and surface the best evidence on how companies ought to be managed and teaching managers the right mind-set and methods for practicing evidence-based management. As with medicine, management is and will likely always be a craft that can be learned only through practice and experience. Yet we believe that managers (like doctors) can practice their craft more effectively if they are routinely guided by the best logic and evidence—and if they relentlessly seek new knowledge and insight, from both inside and outside their companies, to keep updating their assumptions, knowledge, and skills. We aren’t there yet, but we are getting closer. The managers and companies that come closest already enjoy a pronounced competitive advantage.

Here is a direct link to the complete article, Evidence-Based Management.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His latest book, published in 2015, is Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School, where he is co-director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a co-founder and active member of the new “d.school.” His new book, with Huggy Rao, is Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less.