The Age of Heretics

by Art Kleiner

Radical behavior is rarely acknowledged as a characteristic of the corporate world, where status quo is generally king and revolutionary thought usually banished to the fringes. In The Age of Heretics, however, journalist Art Kleiner shows that a powerful group of progressive thinkers really did exist within the realm of traditional business during the tumultuous 1960s. These figures actually helped transform that environment just as their better-known antiestablishment allies were reshaping other institutions throughout society.

Genres: Business, Management, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published May 1, 1996

Reviews

[Michael]

Good book, very broad and thorough. Got a lot out of the discussion of Royal Dutch Shell.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A secret history of late-20th century management theory's love affair with the counterculture. Lipstick Traces for the world of business.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe because it was written in the late 80s-90s he lacked perspective for the later chapters? it turned into a mess of history and lost it's flow after such a great beginning.

[Cecile Demailly · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read on organizational change and the different currents of thought, the models that have developed and the men who have devised them to help people and organizations transform. A must read.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heretics live for innovation which is against the grain as most resist change. Learn the history of the efforts of heretics to reinvent corporate management. Inspiring for would-be heretics.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

What we have in this long overdue, substantially revised and updated Second Edition of Art Kleiner's classic, first published in 1996, is a sweeping and penetrating analysis of various "heroes, outlaws, and the forerunners of corporate change" who struggled (with mixed results) to transform mainstream organizations and even entire cultures throughout a process of multi-dimensional evolution whose can be traced back almost 2,000 years to the monasteries of the early Christian church His model is the mythic literature of destiny and integrity. Why? "Myth holds its characters to a higher ethical standard than they can possibly fulfill and yet shows us how to love them when they slip - or at least it forces us to recognize that slippage is inevitable."

The "heretics" to whom he devotes primary attention in this volume include those involved with the National Training Laboratories (1947-1962), Charles Krone and his colleagues at Procter & Gamble who attempted to improve operations, and Lyman Ketchum and Ed Dulworth who attempted to design and build a state-of-the-art production facility for the Gaines Dog Food division of General Foods (1961-1973).

He concludes it with the observation that countless other heretics now exist in every organization, "balancing the imperative to do good works with the imperative to keep their jobs and keep earning a living...Perhaps a corporation exists, in the end, precisely for its heretics. Perhaps it's purpose in the long run is to help people to expand their souls and capabilities by providing venues within which people can try things on a large scale - to succeed and fail and thereby change the world."

[Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history of the field of Organizational Development (OD) from its inception around the end of World War II to the early 2000s. As a previously unwitting practitioner of OD, I was particularly moved by the connection this book facilitated to the history of what's come before me. It felt like I'd been groping around in a dark room trying to figure out where I was, and this book flipped on a light that not only validated what I've been doing, but contextually situated in it a way that gave it a lot more meaning and weight.

The author fetishizes corporations a bit and at times I felt some points were made from the perspective of a corporate apologist. That said, the unconventional stories shared here are fascinating and help illuminate the evolution of how we understand human organizations (in the case of this book, primarily corporations, but the messages can be more broadly applied. It also shares some of the intriguing and occasionally entertaining ways thinkers and practitioners came to important insights that transformed our understanding of how to interact with one another.

A must-read I think for anyone in the field or orbit of OD, or otherwise with interest in either the history of or how to support groups of people to work better together.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, I read this book purely for research purposes, and my reading was heavily influenced by those purposes: I was on the look out for managerial nonsense-speak, rather than a deep story. But Kleiner tells a good story about, in essence, how one very small group of post-war researchers suggested that employees would be happier and work better if they were (made to feel that they were) involved in the running of a company. He tells it at something enormous length--this is really an essay masquerading as a book)--but there are occasional gems. The allegory he tries to weave through the book isn't all that convincing, but then, he needed to organize it somehow, and there's no obvious way to do it. On the down-side, from my perspective, he's extraordinarily uncritical and almost messianic in his belief that corporations (which are bound *by law* to act in such a way as to maximize profits) could be responsible public institutions. And he writes, not unclearly, but too much. Really only for those who are already interested in the topic, but not so interested that they'd like to read an actual history of managerial practices.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book is "A history of the Radical Thinkers who reinvented corporate management"

But really it's "...of the Radical Thinkers who tried to reinvent corporate management"

The author seems to believe that these people he features somehow changed corporate management for the better. Yes there are companies today that treat their people better, aren't slaves to numbers etc, but wow there are still so many companies that rely on strict planning, top-down management and the same styles of hundred years ago.

The stories Kleiner features are quite fascinating, particularly as they often occurred decades before the ideas became more mainstream, if at all.

[Uma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Traces the evolution of management thought through the ages... and the development of NTL... The names that many of us are familiar with through our Organizational Behaviour textbooks like Maslow, Lewin, Blake and Mouton, Johari... all come alive in the book. It is great to look at the story behind the various models and thought process through the ages around what human beings look for in their work and life... and how though we might debate till we are hoarse, are interlinked more than we ever can imagine.

[Sharonlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, full disclosure: The author is a long-time client and, I hope, a friend. But I liked this book in its first edition and the second one is even better. I really appreciate his analogy that corporate management theory is at the level of medicine before the discovery of the circulation of the blood. I do think Art is helping to move the field a bit past the use of leeches and other barber-surgeon techniques.

[David Shechtman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helped me find my place in the world.