Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Stanford business school professor who write a monthly column for Business 2.0. He has a new book out. In conjunction with that Guy Kawasaki asked him 16 questions about management in a blog post entitled "10 Questions with Jeffry Pfeffer." (Guy is pretty smart, but possibly challenged by counting past 10.) Pfeffer’s first answer shows that he understands the essence of the Trial and Error Economy:
Question: Why do companies do stupid things?
Answer: First, they ignore feedback effects.
On the subject of feedback, I have a short article about a cool example of feedback. (Originally published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty.