Please read the case carefully. Which argument do you agree with (point or counterpoint)? Justify your debate, you can seek additional information from other sources to justify your reasoning.

The Battle of the Texts

Point

Walk into your nearest major bookstore and youll see shelves of management books whose titles tell us the topics we apparently need to know about:

The Secret (Blanchard & Miller, 2014)

Turn the Ship Around! (Marquet, 2013)

The Way You Do Anything Is the Way You Do Everything (Evans, 2014)

Leadership Safari (Iannucci, 2014)

Business Is a Baby (Noh, 2014)

Think Like a Freak (Dubner & Levitt, 2014)

Spiraling Upward (Wallbridge, 2015)

Refire! Dont Retire (Blanchard & Shaevitz, 2015)

Top Dog (Bronson & Merryman, 2015)

Popular books on organizational behavior often have cute titles and are fun to read, but they make the job of managing people seem like its just a matter of having a good slogan and five easy steps. If you dig into the texts, youll find that most are based on the authors opinions rather than substantive research. Most become popular in part because people largely agree with the opinions they are reading and enjoy the authors writing style. Often, the writers are presentation speakers or consultants whose real business is in delivering ideas to you. When the author is a veteran from the business world, it is doubtful that one persons experience translates into an effective management practice for everyone. Even when the authors are numbers-oriented, as are the Think Like a Freak authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, their conclusions for management are not management research based. So why do we base our own management philosophies on these books when, with a little effort, we can access knowledge produced by thousands of scientific studies on human behavior in organizations? Organizational behavior is a complex subject. Few if any simple statements about human behavior are generalizable to all people in all situations. Would you try to apply leadership insights you got from a book about Star Wars or Breaking Bad to managing software engineers in the twenty-first century? Surely not. Neither should we try to apply leadership insights that arent based on research about the type of workplaces in which we function.

COUNTERPOINT

People want to know about managementthe good, the bad, and the ugly. People who have experience or high interest write about the topics that interest readers, and publishers put out the best of these texts. When books become popular, we know people are learning from them and finding good results by applying the authors management ideas. Texts like these can provide people with the secrets to management that others have worked out through experience. Isnt it better to learn about management from people in the trenches instead of the latest obscure references from academia? Many of the most important insights we gain in life arent necessarily the product of careful empirical research studies. Unhelpful management guides sometimes do get published, and once in a while they become popular. But do they outnumber the esoteric research studies published in scholarly journal articles every year? Far from it; sometimes it seems that for every popular business text, there are thousands of scholarly journal articles. Many of these articles can hardly be read by individuals in the workplacethey are buried in academic libraries, riddled with strange acronyms and insider terms, and light on practical application. Often they apply to specific management scenarios, so they are even less generalizable. For example, a few recent management and OB studies were published in 2015 with the following titles:

Transferring Management Practices to China: A Bourdieusian Critique of Ethnocentricity

(Siebers, Kamoche, & Li, 2015)

Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Clan Control in Korean Multinational Companies: A Conceptual Investigation of Employees Fairness Monitoring Based on Cultural Values (Yang, 2015)

The Resistible Rise of Bayesian Thinking in Management: Historical Lessons from Decision Analysis (Cabantous & Gond, 2015)

A Model of Rhetorical Legitimation: The Structure of Communication and Cognition Underlying Institutional Maintenance and Change (Harmon, Green, & Goodnight, 2016)

We dont mean to poke fun at these studies, but our point is that all ways of creating knowledge can be criticized. If business books are sometimes light reading, academic articles can be esoteric and even less relevant. Popular books can add to our understanding of how people work and how to manage them best. We shouldnt assume they are not of value. And while there is no one right way to learn the science and art of managing people in organizations, the most enlightened managers gather insights from multiple sources: their own experience; research findings; observations of others; and, yes, the popular business press. Authors and academics have an important role to play, and it isnt fair to condemn business books with catchy titles.

The Answer needs to have at least three paragraphs:

1- Introduction (20% of your post): Start your discussion by summarizing and comparing both point and counterpoint. In this section, highlight any aspect you find valid/invalid in both arguments.

2- Main body (70% of your post): Express your opinion/take a side, justify it, and make your argument. Use the information in the book and/or any other sources you might find suitable to support your claims (Don't forget to cite the sources you use). You are also welcome to share your work experience.

3- Conclusion (10% of your post): Have a short paragraph at the end to sum up your discussion.

Thank you!