Visit the business section of your local book superstore, and you'll find shelves full of books hawking different management schemes - trumpeting tales of innovative approaches to business. We take this stuff for granted, seldom recalling that we're only a couple of decades removed from a system in which big business was moribund, regarding managers as part of some assembly line, and steering clear of anything that smelled of a humanistic approach to commerce. Just how corporate management figured out that its own interests lie in acknowledging that employees are human beings - and that adopting innovative approaches to management can sometimes be profitable - is the story line of Art Kleiner's The Age of Heretics, a profound, inspiring, and sometimes disturbing account of the people who made it happen.
At the heart of this book are the brave, often quixotic nine-to-fivers who, writes Kleiner, "saw how ... something desperately desirable had been lost in everyday corporate life: a sense of the value of human relationships and community." It was these individuals, rather than a planned movement, who moved the mountain. Kleiner, a former Whole Earth Catalog editor (also a Wired contributor), compares these crusaders to medieval heretics, who changed the Church and the world around them as surely as these modern-day Galileos changed the corporation - and our own lives. They often looked like dweebs and spoke in psychobabble, but their iconoclastic beliefs put them up there with the riskiest edge surfers: they believed that humanizing the business world would benefit the bottom line, and they ultimately got their point across. Kleiner skillfully weaves their stories together, and there is a touch of the epic to this narrative, which stretches from the worker-centered floor of a Procter & Gamble factory in Lima, Ohio, to the prescient spreadsheets of Royal Dutch/Shell futurists. As Kleiner notes, the heresies may thrive, but the heretics are purged.
Kleiner provides an "executive summary," presumably for busy CEOs who want toswallow the essence of the book in a single gulp. Doing this would be like downing a vitamin pill instead of partaking of a seven-course French meal; The Age of Heretics is to be savored in its entirety. Just don't let the boss see you reading it.
The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change, by Art Kleiner: US$29.95. Currency/Doubleday: (800) 323 9872, +1 (212) 354 6500, fax +1 (212) 782 9597, on the Web at www.well.com/user/art.
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