I have just read and will soon review Jeffrey Pfeffer‘s latest book, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, was published by HarperBusines (September 2015) and will then interview him again.

He is among the most insightful business thinkers and certainly attracts attention while generating controversy. Whom does he threaten? Those who embrace the status quo with the same desperation that Linus does with his blanket.

Others who are open-minded to diverse points of view and opinions value him and his work, although they may not always agree with him.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Leadership BS:

“To build a science of leadership, you need reliable data. To learn from the others’ success, you need to know what those others did. The best learning, simply put, comes from accurate and comprehensive data, either qualitative or quantitative. But the leadership business is filled with fables. In autobiographical or semiautobiographical works and speeches, in the cases and authorized biographies leaders help bring into existence, and, in their prescriptions for leadership, leaders describe what they want to believe about themselves and the world and, more importantly and strategically, what they would like others to believe about them. The stories leaders tell or have others tell about themselves on their behalf are primarily designed to create an attractive legacy. Sometimes such accounts are, to put it delicately, incomplete. Because these tales are designed to build an image and a reputation, they do not constitute qualitative data from which to learn. In fact, they aren’t data at all, any more than advertising is data or evidence.”

I agree with Pfeffer about the critical importance of verifiable data rather than rely on information provided by anecdotes, rumors, opinions, etc. that is inevitably subjective and often wrong. The Science of Leadership involves a six-step process:

o Ask a question
o Do thorough background research
o Formulate a hypothesis
o Test your hypothesis with one or more experiments
o Rigorously analyze the data and draw a conclusion
o Share the results so that others can conduct their own experiments

To learn more about Jeff and his brilliant work, please click here.

To check out my first interview of him, please click here.