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Title: The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change by Art Kleiner ISBN: 0-385-41576-1 Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd) Pub. Date: 01 March, 1988 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Inquiry and Inquisition
Comment: 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 façade 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Remember the Revolution?
Comment: This book should remind anyone of an age to be in a position of significant and high-level corporate change responsibility of opportunity lost. In a societal post-culture where it's stylish to be outlandish, different, revolutionary and heretical, Kleiner illustrates for us the substantive difficulties faced by substantive revolutionary thinkers (and doers!) in developing the plans for socially responsible corporate transformation.
The Age of Heretics is almost unfairly engrossing (I read it in a single sitting). Its superb and nuanced documentation at times reads almost like an additional narrative. And Kleiner's wonderfully accessible writing makes this intellectual history of organizational development speak to those otherwise put off by the cerebral work.
Oddly, those most in need of a recovery of revolutionary spirit or heretical passion - contemporary OD/MD/HR executives- won't read it. After all, even though interesting history, it is still history and those folks are now too busy figuring out what happy face button everyone can wear for the fiscal quarter. On my read, this is the lesson of Kleiner's history; that is, abandoning the revolutionary, hopeful,Pelagian spirit and resignation to work within the system enables the system to eat you.
Also oddly, Kleiner's history will likely be dismissed by socially conscious and critically-minded business/organization/management Marxist academics, as just not explicitly critical enough of the "one-dimensionality," technocracy and precipitous consumerism of the capitalist system, which is of course what identifies the work of McGregor, Lewin and the early NTL'ers as heresy. The lesson from Kleiner's work here is that even small scale revolutionary efforts establish precedents for larger ones, and that it's better to try something than simply continue to pontificate - as academics devoted to studying the corporate organization critically are prone to do.
Consequently, both groups miss a valuable history of the connection between the serious committed efforts to change society through corporate transformation by these early renegades and the larger macro socio-philosiohical pronouncements of counterculture theorists. Indeed, Kleiner's book is voraciously consumed by an audience with a particular spirit. Unfortunately, that is few of us. I suspect I speak for all of us in that audience in suggesting that the sequel - The Hour of Reconstruction - is eagerly awaited.
Rating: 5
Summary: If you care about business you'll love this book
Comment: Just for the record--I've worked with Art in the past. But that has nothing to do with my admiration for this book, which provides a brilliant and passionate intellectual trip through the history of corporate vitality today. This book gives the social, historical, and cultural background to the emergence of most of today's wildest corporate excursions. Above all, this book explores how business (that domain so many of us care deeply about) can regain it's "vernacular" roots--reaching back to recognize and re-form some of the meaningful "community" ties it once had. I urge anyone who cares about business as a place where personal growth takes place, where work is more than a mere job, and where groups of people achieve great things, to read this book.
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Title: Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship by Edgar H. Schein ISBN: 020134596X Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 12 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $37.33 |
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Title: International Organizational Behavior: Text, Readings, Cases, and Skills by Anne Marie Francesco, Barry Allen Gold ISBN: 0131924850 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 25 November, 1997 List Price(USD): $100.00 |
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Title: Team Building: Current Issues and New Alternatives (3rd Edition) by William G. Dyer ISBN: 0201628821 Publisher: Pearson Education POD Pub. Date: March, 1995 List Price(USD): $37.33 |
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Title: Statistics Without Tears: A Primer for Non Mathematicians by Rowntree ISBN: 0024040908 Publisher: Pearson Allyn & Bacon Pub. Date: 01 September, 1981 List Price(USD): $56.20 |
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Title: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell ISBN: 0316346624 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 07 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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