The Age of Heretics [Hardcover]

 

 

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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.

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.

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.

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5.0 out of 5 stars If you care about business you'll love this book
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... Read more

Published on Aug 17 1998 by Tom Ehrenfeld

5.0 out of 5 stars I hated to see this one end!
Anyone who works in the area of organizational design or development should read this book. Art puts the history into context and let's us know the people who shaped the ideas. Read more

Published on July 16 1998 by Roger E. Breisch

5.0 out of 5 stars A facinacing read in changing workplace cultures.
The heroes of Kleiner's book are concerned with reducing the psychic costs of work by
better aligning the personal hopes and dreams of employees and the corporations... Read more

Published on Jun 18 1996

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