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These days, people know a lot. Thousands of business books are published around the world each year. U.S. organizations alone spend more than $60 billion a year on training -- mostly on management training. Companies spend billions of dollars a year on consulting. Meanwhile, more than 80,000 MBAs graduate each year from U.S. business schools. These students presumably have been taught the skills that they need to improve the way that companies do business.

But all of that state-of-the-art knowledge leaves us with a nagging question: Why can't we get anything done? It's a mystery worthy of a business-school case study. If we're so well trained and so well informed, then why aren't we a lot more effective? Or, as Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton ask in their useful book, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), "Why is it that, at the end of so many books and seminars, leaders report being enlightened and wiser, but not much happens in their organizations?"

To answer that question, Fast Company talked to Jeffrey Pfeffer, 53, the Thomas D. Dee Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Here, Pfeffer offers 16 rules that explain why, despite so much knowing, there's so little doing -- and what you can do to get something done in your company.

1. Doing something requires ... doing something!

One culpable party is the literature of knowledge management -- almost the cult of knowledge management -- that has grown over the past few years. Advocates of knowledge management as "the next big thing" have advanced the proposition that what companies need is more intellectual capital. While that is undeniably true, it's only partly true. What those advocates are forgetting is that knowledge is only useful if you do something with it.

The reason that we've fallen into this knowing-doing gap is this: Doing something actually requires doing something! It means tackling the hard work of making something happen. It's much easier and much safer to sit around and have intellectual conversations, to gather large databases, to invest in technical infrastructure -- and never actually implement anything.

Compare all of this knowing with the good old Yankee ingenuity of the past -- or even with Bill Gross's idealab! of today. Around the turn of the century, Edison Labs was a place filled with people who were tinkering and doing. Thomas Edison did more than create great inventions; he built a place where people tested their ideas, occasionally blew things up, and then tried again. The closest thing to that today is idealab!, which, in spite of its name, isn't just about ideas. Idealab! is a fabulous example of an organization that not only has ideas but also tests those ideas and turns them into action. It's the same spirit that existed at Edison Labs. But unfortunately, most companies today are too far removed from that spirit.

2. Would you let a great talker perform heart surgery on you?

Today, there are experts on everything except how to get things done. And we reward that expertise -- in the IPO market, in the academic world, and in the job market. For example, there's no question that the stock market has had an influence on the business shift from doing to knowing. The market has made it eminently clear that it is willing to pay -- and pay well -- for ideas. Whether you can actually execute those ideas or not is irrelevant. Today, there are countless companies that have come up with great ideas but can't implement them. But the market still rewards those companies.