The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change. - book reviews

Thankfully, this is no organizational self-improvement screed, with earnest bullet-point lists of new behaviors to adopt and charts comparing some bad old paradigm with some good new paradigm. The book is a history, based on exhaustive interviews with the still-living principals. I found myself repeatedly grateful to learn the origins of things I've run into such as the T-groups which brought confrontational honesty into organizations, for good and ill. I was delighted to see a full account of Herman Kahn's great influence, and of the sequence of events at Royal Dutch/Shell. The savvy author asserts, "If you are a manager, you ... might get a feeling for the influence that the ideas you work with today could have on the direction of civilization during the next century." And Kleiner annotates his bibliography; why doesn't everyone?

COPYRIGHT 1998 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group