I'm Sorry I Broke Your Company

A Globe and Mail Top Business Book of the Year:“Skewers the mystique of management consultants … [an] entertaining guide for how not to manage a business.” —Publishers Weekly

Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards.

Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company—but she's eager to make amends.

“Using tragicomic examples drawn from her experience at a consulting firm, Karen Phelan shows how fad-of-the-day ‘best practices’ can translate into C-level management malpractice, not in-the-trenches results.” —The Dallas Morning News