BeCuriouzLearn something new every day
Why most "secrets of success" books are fooling you
💡 We rarely diagnose why a company succeeds — we see that it succeeded and then invent flattering reasons, so "formulas for success" are often just success described in reverse.
When a company is booming, journalists and researchers rush to explain why: brilliant strategy, visionary leadership, a customer-obsessed culture. In The Halo Effect (2007), business professor Phil Rosenzweig argues that most of these explanations are backwards. We don't observe the culture and then the results — we observe the results and infer the culture.
The halo effect is our tendency to let one overall impression color how we rate specific traits. When sales are up, the same company gets described as "focused," "bold," and "nimble." When the identical company later stumbles, the same traits get relabeled "arrogant," "reckless," and "chaotic" — even if nothing about how it operated actually changed. The performance drives the ratings, not the other way around.
This quietly poisons famous business studies. Researchers gather data on "great" companies, find they share strong leadership and clear values, and conclude those traits cause greatness. But they only labeled the companies great because they were already winning — so the finding is partly circular. Rosenzweig's point isn't that strategy and culture don't matter; it's that success is relative and uncertain, and tidy after-the-fact stories overstate how much we really know.
Source: The Halo Effect… and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers — Phil Rosenzweig