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The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (J-B Warren Bennis Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: Art Kleiner
Creators: Warren Bennis, Steven Wheeler, Walt Mcfarland
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $14.49
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 57266
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 2
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0470190701
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4063
EAN: 9780470190708
ASIN: 0470190701
Publication Date: July 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
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.
Product Description
In this second edition of his bestselling book, author Art Kleiner explores the nature of effective leadership in times of change and defines its importance to the corporation of the future. He describes a heretic as a visionary who creates change in large-scale companies, balancing the contrary truths they can’t deny against their loyalty to their organizations. The Age of Heretics reveals how managers can get stuck in counterproductive ways of doing things and shows why it takes a heretical point of view to get past the deadlock and move forward.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Many of today's business practices are very much due to their own once 'heretical' ideas October 9, 2008
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
Jesus was considered a Heretic by the religious establishment of his time. He also had some radical ideas about wealth, economics, and the personal finances of his followers. "The Age of Heretics: A History of Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management" is a compelling and informative look at those who dared to be different and changed the way their company and possibly the world does business. Rejected in their times, these are men and women who are now retroactively honored for their ideas and innovation in the modern era. Many of today's business practices are very much due to their own once 'heretical' ideas. A highly recommended addition to personal, corporate, academic, and community library Business Studies reference collections, "The Age of Heretics" is inspiring and enlightening reading for any business person who fears their ideas may face initial rejection.
 Excellent Writing on a Very Thoroughly Researched Issue September 1, 2008
Miami Bob (Miami, FL United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Reviewing the basically 1970's ingenuity in the business world, Art Kleiner teaches us that many of the lessons and interpretations of that era are amazingly more profound today than then.
Corporations, explained as to their purpose in the beginning, flourished in postwar America They had sense of duty and power. They were inclined not only to make money, but to make societal declarations. And, amid those developmental periods, many of the leaders are referred to as heretics - leaders who change the corporation or the industry of the corporation (usually for the better).
One General Foods leader said, "Don't get stuck (in the changes) on changing General Foods." Instead, the change was to be made on the industry - the greater good.
Among the many experiments in industry was how to use LSD to greaten perspective. "Engineers were particularly good candidates for LSD research. They were often emotionally sensitive men with painful early lives. . . this resulted in the choice of a vocation that dealt with inanimate objects, sparing further emotional pain. LSD was a marvelous tool for discovering and releasing buried feelings." Hmmm.
Many of the factories of the 1960's were run or managed by the engineers. "In the early 1960's. . . you wanted to become an engineer or physicist. In the early 1970's, there were only two appropriate choices: to be an artist or to save the world. . . In the early 1980's, you would set your sights on becoming an investment banker or corporate magnate . . .In the early 1990's, you would be preparing for a career launching some new Internet-driven entrepreneurial enterprise." Interestingly, in these times, the 1970's calling may be returning - and that may well be why this book was edited and republished as the greener world demands "changes" or concepts to "save" the world.
And, as the book focused mostly on the 1970's, the majority of the research was artistic or about saving the world. The intelligentsia created future predicting programs - we would run out of oil, but would change our dependence by 2025. This was made in 1970! These were impressive minds.
Other predictions were created out of sheer genius or happenstance luck. But, the methodology and expertise hint that the former as opposed to the latter is true.
This book's thorough review of the detailed observations made by brilliant people of that generation is both enlightening and refreshing. Businessmen are more than pencil-pushing bottom liners. They show heretical actions by being motivated by things other than corporate profit. Corporations, as displayed here, are good so long as they adapt. And, adaptation usually arises from the heretics who lead the corporate enterprise to do something not previously encouraged by the mainstream.
One similar book on this need for corporate America to adapt and morph to newer and bigger domains is outlined in William Taylor's "Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win." Heretic or maverick, each is what is adored by the respective author for forging business forward.
As a last note, this author is talented. The research is thorough. The development is well organized. This is not a quickly delivered thesis. And, those points alone make this worthwhile reading.
The waves and undertows of corporate tsunamis August 4, 2008
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Note: The review that follows is of the Second Edition.
Long ago, Voltaire suggested that we cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it. Throughout human history, there have been those who challenged what James O'Toole so aptly describes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Some were executed, others were forced to recant their beliefs, and still others were at first ignored and then ridiculed as cranks, troublemakers, mavericks, misfits, etc. Ironically, many heresies eventually became orthodoxies, usually long after their advocates have died or been silenced. The search for truth continues as newly embraced orthodoxies are questioned and then challenged by other secular "heretics."
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 and continues forward through the Reformation, the establishment of the great European ecclesiastical universities, royal chartering of mercantile stock companies and then state chartering of companies after thirteen colonies won their independence from England, the emergence of nascent entrepreneurs, and the domination of commercial corporations in major industries (e.g. steel, oil, and railroad) from the end of the 19th century until after World War Two.
In the first chapter, Kleiner briefly discusses this background and summarizes key developments since 1945, noting that by the 1950s commercial culture had come to dominate the culture of the world. It was "a vast wave that struck with such immense, captivating grandeur that there seemed to be no escape. But the greater the wave, the stronger the undertow. This is the story of that undertow." 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." In each of the eight remaining chapters, Kleiner focuses on a specific time segment during which "new truths" and their advocates collided with conventional management wisdom and its defenders. On Pages 315-317, Kleiner shares a few of the lessons to be learned from the respective fates of various countercultural ideas.
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).
Kleiner is among very few contemporary business thinkers who combine the highly developed skills of an historian, iconoclast, raconteur, humorist, explorer, thought leader, and cultural anthropologist. At no point does the pace of his extended narrative drag and his writing style reminds me of E.B. White in top form. He seems to perceive his function to be that of a travel agent and tour guide, one who invites his reader to return with him to actual situations in which an individual or members of a group struggled to resolve what he characterizes as "Parzival's Dilemma": "If we are damned for our actions but don't know our actions' results, then how dare we act? And yet when our help is called for, how dare we refrain?"
In Chapter 7, Kleiner examines this dilemma when discussing the process by which NTL was envisioned, established, and developed before it encountered all manner of problems that eventually led to its demise as a functioning organization. (Its influence and impact continue to varying degrees in today's corporate training and development programs.) Kleiner singles out Edie Seashore, Chris Argyris, and Warren Bennis. Each was determined for NTL to change the world, "and each ran up against Parzival's dilemma. Each had to find a way to act, balancing a new understanding against the old orthodoxy, while the potential for mistakes grew ever higher. Each found a different resolution - a different way of muddling through."
The same can be said for most of the other heretics within Kleiner's lively narrative. 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."
And perhaps Art Kleiner needed twelve years before writing this second edition, not to change the world but rather - with rigor and eloquence - to reaffirm the great value of corporate heretics in a world in far greater need of them today than did the world he surveyed in 1996.
 Corporations are not here to remake the world July 14, 2005
Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book makes the false assumption that corporations 'are here to remake the world.'
The fundamental goal of corporations is profit growth. If that needs a remake of the world, they will do it, otherwise not.
By the way, this is also the aim of consultancy firms and one of the reasons why responsible officers are so suspicious of them, seeing the huge fees involved.
These officers need them if they want to implement their own policies, but need to present them as necessary measures proposed by outsiders.
The author has also no problem with an amoral market: 'selling grain overseas for a better price ... while people in the village were hungry ... You gave up your loyalty to the village for loyalty to an impersonal exchange that ... would better everyone in the long run.'
He forgets that in the short run people in the village (could) starve.
This book treats on the same level, consumer activist Ralph Nader, oil planner Pierre Wack, nonrationalist and LSD-mysticist Willis Harman, futurist Herman Kahn, social psychologist Kurt Lewin, 'kundabuffer' Ivan Gurdjieff, the developers of the 'Managerial Grid' and F-groups or the authors of the Report of the Club of Rome; all this under the superficial dressing of some Middle Age philosophies.
Some ideas developed in this book are important: democratic leadership based on dialogue, group dynamics, the importance of listening and respect, community and self-organized teams, shareholder activism or Jay Forrester's model about the interrelationship between population and economic growth, environment, technology and human aspirations.
It exposes also Herman Kahn's optimistic future where everyone would be affluent and have the chance to be educated. Kahn also didn't foresee the domination of transnational corporations.
All in all, I cannot recommend this book.
N.B. Amfortas has not been wounded by a spear in his groin, but in his genitals.
Inquiry and Inquisition January 15, 2001
Jonathan Lehrich (Cambridge, MA USA)
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
Never judge a book by its cover - particularly its blurb. On first glance, The Age of Heretics seems askew, a tract on business revolution for "corporate leaders" interested in anything but. It purportedly chronicles the "recreation" of institutions, an eccentric term when left unhyphenated. It's described in alarming code words, such as "magisterial" (read, "long"). Why would anyone bother with a book like this?Because it's terrific. And because the bland facade is disguising a remarkable reality. The Age of Heretics offers one of the few compelling, intelligent, thoroughly researched histories of the field of organizational development. Focusing largely on the 1960s and 1970s, Art Kleiner details the origins of T-Groups, Theory X and Theory Y, scenario planning, systems thinking, and much more. He proves particularly adept at summarizing an approach or technique succinctly, as if in passing, and all the while in the context of corporate change movements. Perhaps Kleiner errs on the side of the Great Man Theory of History ("there was one man who could do it, and his name was ..."), but he does demonstrate how OD can prove revolutionary to the modern corporation. And we all know what fate befalls the revolutionary. For that is part of Kleiner's history: how the OD early adopters so often sowed the seeds of their own downfall. Perhaps they evolved from enthusiastic to monomaniacal. Perhaps they exacerbated their cultish image by experimenting with LSD. Perhaps they merely stepped on the wrong toes. Whatever the reason, the drugs or the shoes, they blew their own trumpets, then whimpered the blues. As the title suggests, Kleiner dubs these forerunners "heretics," and even adopts a framework of comparisons to medieval knights, millenarians, Pelagians, and the like. The comparisons don't do any harm, and may even add a soupcon of panache, although a few are a stretch. Likening twelfth-century intellectual Peter Abelard to pharmaceutically enhanced 1960s visionaries does the great philosopher a disservice, not least because he's not an ideal model of universalism and holistic thinking. One might also argue that Kleiner misrepresents Parzival's dilemma when he writes of the plight of the OD consultant who fears to lose his job. Parzival encounters an obviously suffering king and must decide whether to ask "what afflicts thee?"; the consultant encounters an organization and must first recognize that there is any affliction in the first place. Such criticisms are minor and admiring. The Age of Heretics is what the English like to call "a rollicking good read": fast-paced, persuasive, and written for adults, not sixth-graders. (Rare is the business author who would think to describe In Search of Excellence, accurately, as Manichaean.) This is not a book for generic "corporate leaders." It's for OD professionals and agents of change. If you pitch your tent in either camp, bring this book along for companionship.
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