About Business Stories

You often hear success (or failure) stories through business articles in the media, consultants, or your colleagues. Case studies are regularly used in formal and informal trainings. If you aren't skeptical about what you're told, you could commit money to a technique that won't work for your company, or mistakenly avoid a technique that would. Writers and speakers often misunderstand that two concepts being related to each other doesn't mean one caused the other, or fail to consider the unique circumstances that may have played a role in the outcome. Regarding each claim as to why a success or failure occurred, ask yourself whether there were:

• Other possible causes than those the story suggests.
• Special circumstances in the unit studied that allowed the technique to work or caused it not to.
• Companies built on less-flashy but better-proven techniques that succeeded with (or in spite of) the techniques the story attribute a success to.
• Companies that succeeded despite using (or even because of) a technique that caused a failure in the story you heard.
• Other reasons the people in the story focused on those techniques (public relations, deflecting personal blame, etc.).

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