Welcome to Art Kleiner's website: A growing body of material and commentary by the author of Who Really Matters and The Age of Heretics. This site also contains commentary by readers, students and correspondents -- on organizations, core groups, writing for new media, and the future.

Other links below include forthcoming appearances and events, as well as links to other writing (past and present) and consulting.
ArtKNews -- click here to receive an occasional email newsletter about organizational change, writing for new media, and projects involving Art Kleiner.
Email: Art Kleiner

Order Who Really Matters from Amazon.com
Order The Age of Heretics from Amazon.com

This site last updated February 24, 2005

photo by Susan Block

FEATURES OF CURRENT INTEREST AT artkleiner.com

Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success

English/U.S. Edition: Doubleday
English/U.K. Edition: Nicholas Brealey
Dutch language edition: Wie is nu eigenlijk de baas!
(Translation: Who is Really the Boss!)
Academic Service, Den Haag
Chinese and Hebrew editions are forthcoming.

Rated one of the best books of the year by Soundview Executive Book Summaries and HR.COM.

"... high marks for entertainment, erudition and lucidity" -- Simon London, Financial Times

"If Machiavelli had looked at organizations rather than princes, he might have written this book" -- Betty Sue Flowers, Global Business Network book club

"..seems about right, based on my experience with all sorts of organizations, at all sorts of levels." -- Glenn (instapundit.com) Reynolds

"...makes the business world much more accessible for liberal arts types like me." -- anonymous reviewer on Amazon.com

"...the first business book that has made my flesh crawl... " -- Gary Vasilash, editor in chief, Automobile Design and Production

"...makes explicable what had previously been mysterious." -- Jim (Built to Last) Collins

"...analogous to giving a life raft to someone who has been treading water for a long time." -- Ruby (A Framework for Understanding Poverty) Payne

"...an invitation to meet your own organization - whether you are in business, government, trade unions or an NGO..." -- Arie (The Living Company) de Geus

For an introduction to the concepts of the book, click here.

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Who Really Matters:
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Organizational Politics and Lessons from the Core Group

This new course at New York University, open to people wanting to change their organizations (or careers) for the better, applying the most significant new theories about hierarchies, networks, process flow and organizational life.

Friday-Saturday, April 29-30, 2005. (Two full days, $675.)

For more information, see the NYU-SCPS web page on the course - or my own brochure.

dialogos

Much of my current consulting work is taking place with this path-breaking firm, based in Cambridge MA and in the UK; one of the few consulting firms I know of that takes reflection, collective leadership, and "living-systems"-style organizational change seriously.

strategy+business

This insightful, forward-looking magazine (published by Booz-Allen Hamilton) is arguably the most incisive management publication in the world right now, with a continually expanding reputation and presence. Since First Quarter 2000, I have written a column on "Culture and Change" and a series of in-depth profiles of management thinkers for them. This link takes you to the journal's home page; to find articles by me, use Advanced Search for my name ("Art Kleiner").

Scenarios for New Media

Check in on images of the future -- ways of thinking about our choices today in light of the possible opportunities and challenges of the next 20 years. This website, hosted by New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, tracks the future scenarios developed there since 1993 by the graduate-level students in my class on the Future of the Infrastructure.

"Stepping Stones"

Developed by myself and two colleagues at Dialogos, here is a program in organic leadership for people in moderate-budget organizations. Teams of 5-6 people from 5 organizations, all near each other, meet five times over the course of a year, working on critical organizational projects.

"How not to Commit Suicide"

Written in 1983, this CoEvolution Quarterly article has helped people decide not to attempt suicide, by showing them what might , realistically, happen to them if they take the leap. 90% of the people who try don't actually pass away; instead, they lose control of their bodies, their health, their time, their rights, and even their depression. (read article)

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook

This link takes you to a website with three key books on organizational learning that I was privileged to help develop: The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (with Peter Senge, Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, and Bryan Smith); The Dance of Change (with the above plus Gearoge Roth); and the education book Schools That Learn (with Peter Senge, Smith, Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Tim Lucas, and Janis Dutton)

A History of Magazines on a Timeline

This article traces the evolution of "communities of interest" around popular magazines, from Addison and Steele to the internet. It was written in 1979, but it anticipated the evolution of what we now call the web.

About Art Kleiner

If you're interested in learning more about me, here is a short biography . (.pdf file*)

The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and Forerunners of Corporate Change

English/U.S. Edition: Available only from Art Kleiner via amazon.com or directly by email.

a "hidden history" of the links between corporate culture, the counterculture, the National Training Labs, environmentalism, finance, and "the way things work around here." These pages include rare photographs (including some left out of the book) of the people profiled within, including the founders of National Training Laboratories, the leaders of organization development, Eric Trist, Amory Lovins, Herman Kahn, Warren Bennis, Pierre Wack, and more........

."...a thundering waterfall of intellectual and moral forces reshaping business..." -- Peter (The Fifth Discipline) Senge

"...a kind of secret history that links the medieval monastic orders, the counterculture of the sixties, and the key agents of corporate change in the modern world..." -- Howard (Smart Mobs) Rheingold

"...an intellectual history tour de force..." -- Joel Garreau, Washington Post writer

"...it's all here: unpredictable experiments in social engineering, weird tales of engineers dropping acid, computer programs predicting the future of the whole world, and the truly odd omnipresence of an Armenian mystic named G. I. Gurdjieff...." -- Phil Agre, UCLA

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The Next Wave of Format

For the past two years, there's been a "crisis in content" on the internet, as well-paid web sites go belly-up. But maybe it's not a crisis at all. Maybe it's a natural evolution of media, in the same way that magazines, newspapers, and television evolved before them. Maybe media evolves through formats, which require different forms of investment and timeframes than technological evolution....This essay, originally published by Global Business Network, explores the possibilities. read article (pdf file)

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The Creative Mind

In strategy+business, I have been writing a series of in-depth profiles of management thinkers:

•The Philosopher of Progress and Prosperity: Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has found a way to enrich the poor. read article...

•Karen Stephenson, the iconoclastic anthropologist who knows how to measure and evaluate informal networks and trust (currently tracking Al Queda); (read article)

• Jim Collins, whose in-depth research into mediocre-turned-good companies (in Good to Great, his current best-seller) inadvertently evoked the test-pilot personality of his own namesake grandfather; (read article)

• Elliott Jaques, recently passed away, who understood hierarchies and human potential probably better than anyone alive (and theorized about their fit together); (read article)

• Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the most eminent historian at Harvard Business School, who has (after 50 years) articulated the core of corporate knowledge; (read article)

• Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars, the team who brought cross-cultural understanding to the corporate world. (read article)

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Culture and Change: Ethics in real life

Here are my columns for strategy+business about the cultural and management issues facing the world today: Columns dealing with scenario pioneer Pierre Wack, corporate governance gadfly Jeff Gates, Hewlett-Packard internal change agent Barbara Waugh, feuding accounting gurus Robert ("Balanced Scorecard") Kaplan and Thomas ("Profit Beyond Measure") Johnson, and more....

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Scenarios from near Ground Zero

Three weeks after September 11, a group of ITP students and faculty met to look ahead at the possible futures that might emerge over the next few years. None of the futures, which ranged from optimistic to very pessimistic, have been ruled out by events. (Well, except for the one which suggested it would be settled by soccer matches.) See scenarios

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Talks by Art Kleiner

"One of the best learning experiences I've had… [your] curiosity and humility created a wonderful climate." - an attendee from a Fortune 50 corporation at a session by Art Kleiner
Follow this link for publicly available speeches and seminars.
If you are interested in arranging a talk, presentation, or seminar, please email me - or call Emily Freidberg at 914-738-9365.

website: Maggie Piper
Contact: Art Kleiner