Read:- Author's Introduction / Executive Summary
Reviews for The Age of Heretics (Doubleday, 1996):
ART KLEINER traces the history of the modern corporation not from the perspective of the chief executive but from the vantage of those mid-level managers, consultants and strategic planners who serve as irritants to the prevailing corporate culture. His book is a lively chronicle of corporate change. Kleiner is able to capture the drama behind seemingly mundane corporate decisions and the heroism of heretics. -- Jill Dutt, Washington Post, September 22, 1996
For... the dozens of other unorthodox business types cited in this entertaining and literate look at how heretics have figured in post-World War II management history, the battlefield was the American corporate culture. In their efforts to move corporate dynamics in more humane, soul-satisfying directions, these modern-day heretics used a variety of tools and theories deemed wildly unorthodox, from Ketchum's production-plant teams to Paul Hawken's attempts at management by consensus at Erewhon, a pioneering natural-foods company . And while mention of psychedelic drug trips of the '60s generally conjures up images of hirsute hippies, Kleiner recounts how executive heretics at Ampex Corp., California-based defense conglomerate Teledyne and other companies participated in LSD sessions in an effort to develop more emotional empathy.
Kleiner, a former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and free-lance business reporter during the 1980s Wall Street boom and 1987 stock market crash, writes with one foot in the counterculture and the other in the corporate camp. Clearly, it is the idealistic, counterculture Kleiner who muses, "Perhaps a corporation exists, in the end, precisely for its heretics. Perhaps its purpose, in the long run, is to help people 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." In a more nitty-gritty nod to what the author calls 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," the book opens with a summary of salient points for busy execs to skim. Among them: Corporate heretics drew on a body of intellectual work rooted in spiritual traditions, '60s counterculture and humanistic psychology and role-playing, among other things. And while such heretics can be silly or pretentious, they may be the closest thing we have to genuine heroes, serving as an "unsung conscience" of civilization. --- Lynn Van Matre, Chicago Tribune, May 20, 1996
Kleiner has written an interesting and thoughtful book about people in American business who were considered eccentric - or worse - at the time, but have since been proven not to be so far afield after all. -- Jeff Rowe, Charlotte Observer, May 6, 1996
In his engagingly digressive chronicle, Kleiner (co-editor of News That Stayed News: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, 1986) focuses on the square pegs and odd ducks who wanted to reform rather than repudiate the commercial concerns or institutions that employed them.... A welcome if offbeat contribution to corporate literature, one that examines the communitarian possibilities of large multinational organizations rather than their presumptive failings and deficiencies. -- Kirkus
Kleiner is a freelance business writer who has also been a contributing editor for "Whole Earth Review". In addition, he was a coauthor of organizational learning guru Peter Senge's "Fifth Discipline Fieldbook" (1994). Kleiner has compiled here a history of contemporary management ideas dating from World War II. Many of these ideas evolved from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions and from humanistic psychology, and were in reaction to concepts such as Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" that had dominated management thinking to that point. Kleiner portrays the advocates of these "new" ideas as heretics because, primarily during the 1950s and 1960s, when they became most active, they chose to fight for change "within the system" rather than "dropping out" as did many of their counterparts. Kleiner suggests that such now widely accepted notions as corporate social responsibility and organizational teams grew out of their heretical ideas, and, by focusing on the individuals involved, he has constructed a lively, readable account. -- Booklist
The Age of Heretics is familiar to me because Art Kliener spent some time with us at Bethel interviewing Edie Seashore as one of his identified heretics. Even with that bias and the fact that my name is also to be found in a supporting cast role to Edie, I think Art has done a great job at looking at leaders who have the attribute of going "against the grain" of the times - a sort of anti-zeitgeist thing. It is a very interestly different cut on leadership models at a time when we seem to be getting a new book on the topic each month that is not always that new. -- Charlie Seashore
Mr. Kleiner concludes by asking catechismically, why do corporations exist? He writes, "It might seem ridiculous at first, to answer that question by saying, 'They are here to remake the world.' " The question may seem a little over the top, but it's not ridiculous if you think corporations are like the medieval monasteries that were the only line of defense against demons and chaos. But isn't the current, stalemated debate over layoffs, C.E.O. compensation, shareholder value and corporate responsibility, if not about demons and chaos, really about the role corporations play in society?
Its idiosyncrasies aside, "The Age of Heretics" pushes that debate past good and evil into ambiguity, where it is really interesting.
-- Barbara Presley Noble, Strategy and Business
Kleiner's profiles are refreshing and fun to read. More than that, they are sure to inspire innovative managers to keep challenging the tried-and-true ways of doing business, and maybe even make some radical changes. -- Sales and Marketing Management
Advance praise for The Age of Heretics (Doubleday, 1996):
This is a story that has wanted to be told for a long time: how the seeds of revolutionary change beginning now to take root and spread in the management mainstream originated over the past fifty years. Art Kleiner does a remarkable job of weaving diverse threads - daring experiments like T-groups, early socio-tech manufacturing designs at P&G, scenario thinking at Royal-Dutch Shell; highly visible social developments like the corporate responsibility activists, the 60's counterculture, and the rise of environmentalism; and the theories of seminal thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Douglas MacGregor, Chris Argyris, Jay Forrester, and Amory Lovins -- into a compelling tapestry. These are no mere "currents of change," but rather a thundering waterfall of intellectual and moral forces reshaping business.
It is fashionable today to see information technology and globalization as the dominating forces reshaping the corporation. But focusing only on these misses entirely the revolution of ideas that may determine how successful enterprises of the 21st century respond to these external changes. - Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, and director of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning.
For people like myself, who entered business without studying it first, these stories of corporate innovators will be new and fascinating. The Age of Heretics shows people that the marketplace is a mixed blessing -- that short-term economic benefits may be married to long-term personal and social costs. It is a primer of great interest, one that will move people within organizations to widen their sense of the possible. - Doug Carlston, CEO and founder, Broderbund Software
Corporate change continues to accelerate these days unaware of its own history. Art Kleiner's lucid account show hows the revolution began in the ideas and passions of a handful of revolutionaries. - Stewart Brand, principal, Global Business Network, author, How Buildings Learn and The Media Lab, and founder, Whole Earth Catalog
Heretics are the great unwashed competitive advantage of American business. They are indispensable to the very growth that some of them challenge as the wrong goal. Art Kleiner writes knowledgeably and dramatically about their insights and insurgencies as well as their illusions and romances. It's a good read. -Thomas M. Hout, coauthor, Competing Against Time, and Vice- President, The Boston Consulting Group
Art Kleiner has uncovered a kind of secret history that links the medieval monastic orders, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the key agents of corporate change in the modern world. Is it possible to do better business, transform corporations into more effective institutions, and build a more humane and sustainable world? If so, it will be due to the efforts of the heretics whose work Art Kleiner traces in this book. I think it's a landmark for people inside and outside the most influential institution of the modern age - the corporation. - Howard Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought, Virtual Reality, and Virtual Communities
By masterfully presenting reality through the eyes of the "heretics" of the corporate world, Art Kleiner radically expands our own views of the realities of commerce and management. He also tells a hell of a good story. This book is destined to be a classic of business journalism. - Steven Levy, author of Hackers and Insanely Great
Art Kleiner has written a book that is both brilliant pop culture history and bible for business radicals. The perfect book for managerial martyrs who are prepared to be burned at the stake -- but would rather not be. - Michael Schrage, author of No More Teams
If you want to understand the wiring diagram inside your head -- why it is you treat your opportunities, employees, partners, and customers the way you do, read The Age of Heretics. It's an intellectual history tour de force. - Joel Garreau, author of Edge City and The Nine Nations of North America
From the Doubleday description:
The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and Forerunners for Corporate Change (Doubleday, 1996) is a history of the social movement to change corporations for the better. A magisterial cultural history, The Age of Heretics tells the story of the sixties revolution for freedom, self-expression, and high ideals - as it occurred not in the streets, but in business.... Art Kleiner, who has covered social trends for The New York Times, Wired, and the Harvard Business Review, charts the rise of the "corporate heretics" of the 1960s who, like their medieval counterparts, sought to revolutionize the dominant institutions of their time. Unlike their peers in the radical underground, corporate heretics fought for change within large corporations such as Shell Oil, General Foods, and Procter & Gamble. Different from most business leaders, they believed passionately that corporations could be the center not only of power, but of truth, freedom, and equality.
Through a series of compelling stories, most never told before, Art Kleiner introduces readers to the visionary people who brought a form of democracy to key Fortune 100 companies in this country - in social experiments that corporations have often tried to contain or cut short... The euphoric successes and personal failures of many of these dreamers provide powerful lessons formanagers who are striving to revolutionize business today...
The Age of Heretics blends medieval heresy vignettes and a sense of the background of the corporate climate with the stories of people like Kurt Lewin, Douglas McGregor ("Theory X and Theory Y"), the Gaines Topeka dog plant, Charlie Krone (long before the "Kroning" that still haunts Pacific Bell), Saul Alinsky, Ralph Nader and Campaign GM, the scenario planners of Royal Dutch/Shell, Herman Kahn, Willis Harman, Jay ("Limits to Growth") Forrester, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton (the first modern corporate consultants), Edie Seashore (the first diversity consultant), Chris Argyris, Warren Bennis (whose prominent books about "leadership" drew on his experience as president of the University of Cincinnati), Paul Hawken, Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group, and Tom Peters. The book ends with a meditation on corporate purpose; from the beginning, these gargantuan, misguided institutions were created to change the world for the better. If they don't, it's because they've gone astray from their original design.
Art Kleiner is a consulting editor at the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, and the editorial director/coauthor of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. He has been an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, a writer for Wired, the New York Times Magazine and the Harvard Business Review, and a faculty member at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (a pioneering graduate program in multimedia arts and knowledge).