(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch)
As Professor Phil Rosenzweig of the IMD business school in Switzerland demonstrates, nearly all the usual explanations of business success are useless and exaggerate the impact that individual managers have. When a company is doing well, we explain its success in terms of its leadership and culture. When the company starts to do badly, we make opposite attributions – we find all kinds of reasons why the leader and the culture have screwed up. In reality, we are not explaining success or failure: we are just rationalising it.