(thanks for the link Peter).

http://www.evidence-basedmanagement.com/research_practice/2005_presidential_address_amr_apr06.pdf

I had the same thought listening to an entire presidential talk on this at an academy meeting (was it AOM 2005?). Ruined my lunch for sure.

What isn’t clear to me, however, is what EBM rules out. Look again at the quote from Pfeffer and Sutton above. What constitutes “best evidence”? What does it mean to “act on this evidence”? The articles on Pfeffer and Sutton’s site seem to contrast EBM to decision making based on gut instinct, precedent, or herd behavior. But those too can be consistent with “rational” behavior, if rational simply means making best use of the information you have. Gut instinct could refer to rules of thumb or cognitive frames that help simplify a complex problem. Relying on precedent, or past behavior, is completely sensible in a Bayesian-updating sort of way — when new “facts” emerge, you don’t completely throw away your old conclusions, but rather update your beliefs according to the strength of the new information. Finally, following the crowd can also be fully rational, if there is reason to believe that members of the crowd possess information you don’t.

It seems to me that every management theory portrays firms acting in some unique boundedly rational way. Doesn’t it make sense to set up another theory of straightforward rationality bounded only be experience and uncertainty? One could argue that this is just neoclassical economics, but the fact that economics covers something doesn’t mean that management shouldn’t have its own version.

We’ve accumulated so much research on bounded rationality of various forms, perhaps it makes sense for a practitioner-oriented HBR to present the alternative.