Read:- Author's Introduction / Reviews
The Executive Summary of "The Age of Heretics"
Managers, it is said, are too busy to read. Instead, they skim. They spend their precious reading time -- on the train, on hold during a phone call, or under the porch light while their children sleep -- sifting through hyped-up, ponderous business literature, searching relentlessly for any practical nuggets. Give them something they can use, on the shop floor or in a strategic plan. Give them something that can solve their problems, or make their efforts succeed, or let them go home early tonight.
This is not a book of nuggets, but a story of management history. To read it, if I've done my job correctly, is to drift down the broad stream of business thought and activity Ä particularly the rebellious and innovative parts --from the past 50 years. En route, you will relive the intellectual influences and emotionally charged controversies of managerial culture since World War II.
If you are a manager, you might discover where your work and your thinking have come from, where they are going, and what forces have helped create them. You might get a feel for the influence that the ideas you work with today could have on the direction of civilization during the next century. Those who do not understand change are condemned to stay the same.
If (like me) you are not a manager, and never have been a manager, then you live in a world dominated by an alien culture. Nothing is created on a large scale without corporations. You may resent the culture of business (so many people do). In fact, the culture you resent is the culture of executive summaries, the culture that boils stories down to a few choice nuggets, the culture that has no time for the fable, but only time for morals like these:
"New truths," said Thomas Huxley, "begin as heresies." He was defending Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. He might have added that new heresies also begin as truths. A heretic is someone who sees a truth that contradicts the conventional wisdom of the institution -- and remains loyal to both entities, to the institution and the new truth. Heretics are not apostates; they do not want to leave the "church." Instead, they want the church to change, to meet the truths that they have seen halfway.
Beginning in the late 1950s, a growing number of heretics emerged in the dominant institutions of our time -- mainstream, publicly held, large multinational corporations. These were people within the firm, who saw a truth which ran against its prevailing attitudes. They saw how, despite the power of corporate practice, something desperately desirable had been lost in everyday corporate life: A sense of the value of human relationships and community. They saw how, without that human spirit, corporations could not perform.
Modern heretics are not burned at the stake. They are relegated to backwaters or pressured to resign. They see their points of view ignored, or their efforts undermined. They see others get credit for their ideas and work. Worst of all, they see the organization thrive as a byproduct of their efforts, while the point of their heresy, the truth they fought to bring to the surface, is lost.
Corporate heretics were reviled from the Left (as "ineffectually trying to work within the system, when the system should be destroyed") and from the Right (as "disloyal, effete, snobbish, and maybe Communistic"). Many corporate heretics were silly or pretentious: snake oil salesmen (and saleswomen) of one sort or another. And yet, corporate heretics may be the closest thing we have, in our self-contradictory time, to genuine heroes. They provide the unsung conscience of our civilization.
They also represent an inevitable historical process. An institution, or a culture, sheds heretics as it matures.
We cannot say, incontrovertibly, that any one corporation or organization has permanently changed, for the better, as a result of the events described in this book.
But we can say that society as a whole has changed. Many of the tensions and revelations of society today, in 1995, represent the playing out of forces that the heretics unveiled in the 1950s and 1960s.
The skills all of us are going to need, as citizens and private individuals, have to do with learning to be responsible for large-scale endeavors, without being in control of them. Corporate heretics have pioneered the learning of these skills. And their heretical ideas have gradually moved into the mainstream, becoming key components of the operating premises of institutions worldwide:
•Nothing can be effectively controlled, in the long run, from the top of a hierarchy-- or from any one perspective.
•People are basically trustworthy. Only workplaces that give their members the chance to learn and add value through their work will succeed in the long run.
•Industrial growth, when untempered by constant intelligent inquiry, leads to overshoot and collapse.
•No one can predict the future. All we can do is choose our contribution to the circumstances out of which the future will take its shape.
•No one can make anything happen, in the long run, by commanding, programming, or regulating it. We can only change the world by taking part in it, whole-heartedly, as if at any moment, our command may be upturned.
These themes have engaged dozens of people in complicated, controversial lifelong work, work to which they devoted themselves, and which often consumed them. This book is about those people. Behind every executive summary, there is a story...