The Age of Heretics A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management

by Kleiner, Art; Bennis, Warren; Wheeler, Steven; McFarland, Walt

• ISBN13: 9780470190708
• ISBN10: 0470190701
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-28
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Summary

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. This book shows that a powerful group of progressive thinkers really did develop 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. In 1996, when The Age of Heretics was first published, it was read and reviewed by a devoted audience. They saw in it a bolstering and expansion of their own efforts to understand and reform the modern-day corporation. And today, even though it is out of print, there is still a strong community of followers in the business community who demand the book. The world is in a different place than it was in 1996. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , along with the failures of many companies after the dot-com bubble burst, have explicitly demonstrated the importance of good management in achieving results - and how countercultural good management can be in many settings. The evolution of the World Wide Web, the successes of open-system projects like Linux, the growing importance of corporate environmentalism, the increased cachet of high-performance management, and the need of global enterprises to implement cross-boundary initiatives have all brought legitimacy to management approaches that would have been unthinkable in most companies fifteen years ago. This edition will update and expand on the success of the first edition.

Author Biography

Art Kleiner is the editor-in-chief of the quarterly magazine strategy+business (http://www.strategy-business.com). He is the author or coauthor of several acclaimed business books, and is a faculty member at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. His articles have been published in a variety of places, including Wired, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and The New York Times Magazine.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xi
Preface	p. xv
To the Reader	p. xix
Monastics: Corporate Culture and Its Discontents, 1945 to Today	p. 1
Pelagians: National Training Laboratories, 1947-1962	p. 19
Reformists: Workplace Redesign at Procter & Gamble and the Gaines Dog Food Plant in Topeka, 1961-1973	p. 48
Protesters: Saul Alinsky, FIGHTON, Campaign GM, and the Shareholder Activism Movement, 1964-1971	p. 85
Mystics: Royal Dutch/Shell's Scenario Planners, 1967-1973	p. 121
Lovers of Faith and Reason: Heretical Engineers at Stanford Research Institute and MIT, 1955-1971	p. 155
Parzival's Dilemma: Edie Seashore, Chris Argyris, and Warren Bennis, 1959-1979	p. 186
Millenarians: Erewhon, the SRI Futures Group, Herman Kahn, Royal Dutch/Shell, and Amory Lovins, 1968-1979	p. 226
The Rapids: Hayes and Abernathy, Tom Peters, W. Edwards Deming, the Creators of GE Work-Out, and Other Synthesizers of Management Change, 1974-1982	p. 269
Bibliography	p. 321
Notes	p. 337
Acknowledgments	p. 373
About the Author	p. 381
Index	p. 383
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