The authors, in part, blame higher education and the consulting industry for this gap in knowing and doing. The problem is that for MBA students and management consultants there is a strong premium placed on saying smart things and so little emphasis placed on sticking around to make sure that organizations actually do smart things. MBA education, especially at top schools, focuses on case discussions where students gain status and get good grades for making pithy statements, which are almost never longer than one minute. Talk also is overestimated because it is human nature for people to quickly categorize each other, the authors say. The person who sounds smartest in a meeting is likely to get a high rating because it takes much longer to find out if his or her actions are also smart.
People also change jobs so quickly that it is hard to know what they have accomplished.
For instance, managers often make decisions and talk about them to employees but have no implementation strategy or way of monitoring progress. They point to companies such as IDEO Product Development, The Men's Wearhouse, SAS Institute, Barclays Global Investors, Fresh Choice and others to illustrate how some companies are able to avoid or overcome these action inhibitors. The Men's Wearhouse, for example, is a clothing chain where executives stay in touch by waiting on customers when they are in the stores. They also emphasize their core values about how people should relate to one another by giving employees who are caught shoplifting a second chance and by monitoring sales transactions and reprimanding those who hog all the walk-in traffic for themselves. A strong organizational memory also can undermine performance, the authors say.