The Half Life of Ideas

Today's Wall Street Journal includes an excellent essay by Phred Dvorak (love that name!) about why management trends quickly fade away. (You might need an online sub.) Drawing on the expertise of management consultants and thinkers such as Thomas Davenport, the piece suggests that the biggest culprits may include:

• Consultants offer services in which they lack expertise
• New ideas come and go faster and faster
• People try to apply the same idea to too many dissimilar problems
• New practices and processes don't work for every organization

Which do you think is the real reason? Take the Fast Company poll.