Jeffrey Pfeffer
Jeffrey Pfeffer
Professor, Organizational Behavior Stanford Graduate
School of Business, Stanford University
Jeffrey Pfeffer's research has focused on the sources and use of power in organizations, human resource management, leadership, turning knowledge into action, organizational labor markets and pay practices including the causes and consequences of wage inequality, the relationship between organizations and their environments, organizational design and structure, how social science theories become self-fulfilling, economics language and assumptions and their effects on management practice, and most recently, the mental accounting for time and money and how this mental accounting affects decisions about time use.
Pfeffer is the author or coauthor of 12 books in the fields of organization theory and human resource management. A few include: The External Control of Organizations: A Resource-Dependence Perspective, Managing with Power, The Knowing-Doing Gap, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, as well as more than 110 articles and book chapters. He has won the Richard D. Irwin Award for Scholarly Contributions to Management as well as numerous awards for articles and books.
Pfeffer has taught the core course in organizational behavior and human resource management and currently teaches a second-year elective, The Paths to Power. A talented lecturer, he has taught executive seminars in 28 countries throughout the world in addition to lecturing in management development programs for various companies, associations, and universities in the United States. Pfeffer currently writes a monthly column, "The Human Factor," for the 650,000-circulation business magazine, Business 2.0, and serves on the board of directors of Audible Magic and SonoSite, as well as being on the advisory board of Laszlo Systems.
What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management
Professor Pfeffer will challenge conventional management wisdom while providing data and insights to help organizations make smarter decisions. His will also provide guidelines on how to think more intelligently about critical management issues. In his examples, Dr. Pfeffer will explore the following three unifying themes:
1. Actions can have unintended consequences,
2. Organizational models can be naïve and over simplistic
3. The tendency to overcomplicate straightforward choices