One thing I did agree with Jack Wiley on, and was pleased to hear him say (because sometimes I’ve felt I’m the only one who does) was that the adage, ‘people join organisations but leave managers’, is a myth. That the data just doesn’t back it up.

Of course, there’s a lot more of these fallacies as well. One of my other favourites is ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’. It’s. Not. True.

There are more of these in Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books, ‘Hard facts, dangerous half-truths and total nonsense’ (with Bob Sutton) and ‘What were they thinking?’. And in Bob Sutton’s blog. (Yes, OK, I know these two are fans of evidence based management and would therefore probably want you to measure so that you can manage. So?).


Anyway, regarding ‘people join organisations but leave managers’, Jack Wiley suggests the issue is just a lot more complicated than that.