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What it argues
Nine Lies About Work challenges nine assumptions that dominate how organizations are designed and managed — assumptions Buckingham and Goodall argue are not just wrong but actively harmful. The nine lies cover topics ranging from cascading goals and 360-degree feedback to the idea that people care which company they work for and that leadership is a coherent set of traits that can be assessed and developed uniformly.
The book's most provocative arguments concern performance management. Buckingham and Goodall attack the validity of most performance ratings, arguing that ratings reveal more about the rater than the person being rated — a phenomenon backed by their own research at Deloitte and ADP. The idea that a manager can objectively assess someone's competence against a standard is, they claim, largely fiction; what actually drives performance is the specific relationship between a team member and their direct manager, and whether that manager can see and deploy each person's unique strengths.
What it gets right
- 1.
Most performance ratings say more about the rater's own style and biases than about the person being rated — a phenomenon Buckingham and Goodall call the idiosyncratic rater effect.
- 2.
People don't primarily care which company they work for; they care about their team. Engagement is a team-level phenomenon, not an organization-level one.
- 3.
Cascading goals — translating organizational strategy into individual objectives — are a management ritual that rarely produces alignment in practice.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Marcus Buckingham is a British-American author and researcher who spent twenty years at the Gallup Organization before founding his own research consultancy, now part of ADP. His books include Now, Discover Your Strengths, First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman), and StandOut. He is known for popularizing the strengths-based approach to management and employee development. Ashley Goodall spent his career as a senior HR executive at Deloitte and Cisco, leading large-scale research into performance management. Nine Lies About Work draws on data from both their careers and represents their most direct challenge to mainstream HR practice.
