Over the past several years, I have seen very few times when the business world has adapted management practices that were originated in medicine-it typically is just the opposite.  The global trend of EBP though has some significant analogies in business and I hope and believe that there will be overflow from EBP into the business sector.

Every year there are hundreds of leadership books by various “gurus” all espousing techniques that infrequently have sound basis from a research perspective.  Many businesses quickly implement “fads”, “trends”, and practices by businesses that they view as successful.  Gaps exist between when we know a business practice to be useful before it is proven.  How many businesses are successful in adapting “balanced scorecards”, “benchmarking”, “lean manufacturing”, “best practices”, “360 degree feedback”?    Very often texts and business cases that I studied some years back during my MBA training were already out of date.  I believe it is also true that most managers practice what they learned in school or what they learned from their first job.  Does all this sound like the same background for EBP in medicine?  I am not familiar with a “cochrane” type of resource, systematic reviews, or meta-analysis’, or anything akin to this in the academic side of business-but I am hopeful that there will be some efforts to replicate an unbiased approach to review of management and leadership practices.   There is a lot of business research and perhaps good databases.  Many consulting companies (analogous to drug companies?) produce research espousing their techniques and services but this hardly qualifies as independent.

Since we all work in businesses, shouldn’t we question those practices in the same way?  Any thoughts on this?

Larry