Sarah McAdams reviews the book The Age of Heretics: A History of Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management by Art Kleiner. Review gives history of managers and HR that challenged the corporate norm. 
Arguably, the corporate world has never needed heretical thinking more than it does today. Read Art Kleiner’s The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (J-B Warren Bennis Series)
Released in July, the new version, which is subtitled A History of Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, offers ideas for managers who feel trapped in their employers’ counterproductive ways of doing things. Chances are, you’re one of them: someone who, as Kleiner describes, is “balancing the imperative to do good works with the imperative to keep [your] job and keep earning a living.”
Such a balance is possible but often takes courage and radical thinking, as showcased by Kleiner’s fascinating stories of real-life corporate heretics over the years, including:
- General Foods manager Lyman Ketchum, who helped revolutionize factories everywhere by putting together a new type of work team at the Gaines dog food plant;
- group planner Pierre Wack, who used the spiritual wisdom of a Japanese gardener and a Sufi mystic to introduce scenario planning and prepare Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1970s for 21st century oil politics; and
- rebel labor-organizer Saul Alinsky, who pioneered the use of shareholder activism to open Kodak’s doors to more African-Americans.
But of particular interest to HR folks might be one of the earliest examples of corporate diversity efforts, the story of Edie Seashore’s revolutionary rebuilding in the 1970s (with the help of her three other “horsepersons”) of the paternalistic and narrow-minded National Training Laboratories (NTL) into an equal and diverse organization that thrived. As Kleiner writes:
NTL meetings had people from every conceivable ethnic background, of both genders at every age, in all sexual orientations, wearing a wide variety of garments, and speaking in a broad range of accents and styles. Yet somehow they all seemed to be able to operate in sync. They had faced the tribulations that came from their differences and talked through them enough so that they understood each other.
Well-written and clever, this book is packed not only with better-known anecdotes, but “who knew?” tales of corporate counterculture (LSD as a management tool?! In the ‘50s and ‘60s, absolutely, writes Kleiner. Apparently, many companies swore it improved both managers’ conflict-resolution abilities and engineers’ problem-solving skills).
I’d recommend this book to any HR pro who feels weighed down by workplace drudgery; not only is it a good read, it also might be the thing that inspires you to shake things up and finally share some long-mulled crazy idea with the CEO. And that’s a good thing: no one, after all, is writing books about those of us who spend decades melting into the background.
Sarah McAdams writes the popular “Balancing Act” and “Office Watch” columns for HR Insight. Sarah has reported on human resources for a variety of publications, including the Journal of Employee Communication Management, Corporate Legal Times and The Ragan Report. She has written about many other subjects for publications like the Chicago Tribune, Montreal Gazette, Orlando Sentinel, Self magazine and Daily Variety. McAdams also helped ghostwrite the book Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose, and Passion After 50 by David D. Corbett (Jossey-Bass, 2007).