This article represents one of the problems I have with HBR and "business school" literature in general. It's a rehash of tried and true principles that have b

This article represents one of the problems I have with HBR and "business school" literature in general. It's a rehash of tried and true principles that have been described numerous times before almost always without attribution to original sources. What's wrong with that? Well, for one the authors are passing off work that is clearly not their own. Fine, whatever, it's a b-school publication, nobody takes their intellectual output seriously anyways. But the more important problem is that you lose a sense of where this knowledge has come from, where it's been applied, how it's been applied, and other important context. In other words, reading this article is basically a waste of time. It's better to stick to a handful of classic business texts (Drucker's a good place to start and yes, he goes over all the recommendations these authors make in Effective Executive). Reading Kaplan on the Balanced Scorecard is another good place to start.