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ing conclusions on IBM's practices, observers tended to emphasize the im- portance of hierarchical organizational structure and even formal attire among other keys to their success. At the time, few, if any, predicted or warned students and readers about the upcoming problems IBM would face in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, some of the very policies that had been vaunted as the keys to IBM's success, such as their organizational struc- ture, now began to be seen as factors in their demise.5 Every few years, the reigning management gurus turn over and a new set of ideas become the prevailing slogans. Even ideas that are sound become adopted and twisted into little more than buzzwords thrown around by hustlers of management advice. Over just the past few decades, "management-by-objective," "total quality management," "six sigma," "strategic management," "mission-ori- ented," "benchmarking," and many others have undergone these kinds of transformations.6 Such flip-flopping, though, is not uncommon when hunches drawn from experience and anecdote are the primary or sole bases used to try to de- termine successful management policies. Using coaches, their practices, and their advice has led to the same kinds of failures. Based on the success and popularity of coaches such as Vince Lombardi with the Packers or Bear Bryant with Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of coaches im- itated the tough-as-nails discipline of players. Lombardi himself helped to promote the focus on discipline because he viewed the discipline-intensive aspects as critical to his success. Yet, many coaches who emulated his in- tensive methods failed and sometimes failed miserably. In contrast, other coaches who ignored the Lombardi trends and developed a much less re- strictive style, such as Oakland's John Madden, enjoyed tremendous suc- cess. Even today, many coaches still subscribe to the view that the extreme methods of Lombardi are the key to success even though many successful coaches have not used them and many unsuccessful coaches have. The same thing is true when observing the practices of famous managers. People such as Alfred Sloan, legendary CEO of General Motors, and latter- day managerial whiz, Tom Peters, are at different ends of the spectrum in the kinds of advice they have drawn from their experiences. Sloan preached a highly rational, scientific approach to the analysis and practice of man- agement. Peters promoted a looser, "management by walking around" phi- losophy. People such as Microsoft's Bill Gates and General Electric's Jack Welch fall somewhere in between these two extremes but tend to draw out principles that are unique to them or at least stated in somewhat unique terms. Does this mean that experiences and anecdotes are useless in the study of management practice? No, it does not. The lesson is that observation and experience need to be kept in their proper place. Drawing from the ex- 7