Most bestselling books are awful, specially business related. They usually are a bunch of pop psychology bullshit taken out of context or falsely turned into generalizations. One of these examples is Drive by Daniel Pink: He takes one example of a study done in a few hours. They picked up some random people (probably college students, I read it years ago) and gives one group twenty dollars to finish a puzzle, and another zero money, they volunteered. The group that was paid immediately left after the time was up even if they didn’t finish the puzzle, the group who volunteered and didn’t get paid stayed X amount of time trying to solve it after the time was up. From this they determined that Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic and you have management techniques trying to trick employees into working harder without offering financial incentives. This is despite wage stagnation and todays young adults being more financially screwed over than any American generation since the Great Depression.
Not only this, but it doesn’t work outside the context they’re taking it. You look at American gold rush or the Conquistadors and tell me wealth wasn’t a motivator for them. Take a regular sales rep, tell him his pay is linked to his performance and they’ll kill themselves working extra hours to make more money (I’ve been there). Employees have needs that money will give them, be it family, themselves, or just wanting to appear high status and eat at restaurants. Trying to make them find intrinsic motivation to work on your company of widgets isn’t going to do anything fundamentally drastic per say, which is not to say social relations in the company and in some rare occasions (not the general rule) they do believe they’re changing the world or actually accomplishing it. People in tech and finance tend to work long hours for the pay, the same with sales reps.
These little studies is like taking a wild animal out of its ecosystem in nature, seeing them react in X way and claiming that’s a way they act in their ecosystem. The way they act in a lab isn’t necessarily how they will act in their natural ecosystem.
The book chimpanzee politics, which analyzes the behavior of chimpanzees in captivities later proved that the way they acted in captivity wasn’t necessarily the same as done in the wild. A big part of this was due to being locked in a small space, as in the wild they would be able to distance themselves from antagonists than have so many direct confrontations, while interacting with other troops.
Point being: These case studies and recipe books for success (specially in business) tend to be useless for you since your context is different, and they most likely misinterpreted the findings in any case and are miss applying it into a general setting. It seems to be an obsession to know the latest tricks for success and apply them to their situation like a cookie cutter.
Instead they should be studying epistemology. How are they interpreting the situation, how are they coming up with their judgements? Do they know the different types of logic and when they apply? The goal should be to be able to have proper judgement, not a rule book from the latest pop psychology some dumb ass is claiming is settled fact because it appeared on a bestseller whose writing was dumb down to match his reading level and average IQ.
Genghis Khan didn’t need Sun Tzu to conquer and manage his empire. Look at the situation with fresh eyes, and act accordingly.