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"While protesters stormed through Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village, an equally radical group of "corporate heretics" was fighting for change within major corporations such as Shell Oil, General Foods, and Procter & Gamble. These heretics recognized that, to truly change society, they would have to attack the dominant institutions of their time. In this magisterial cultural history that offers new insight into the recreation of institutions, journalist Art Kleiner shows how the heretics' struggle for truth paved the way for the ideals of democracy in key Fortune 100 companies." "Take the story of Lyman Ketchum, a plant manager for General Foods. Ketchum's experience with the encounter groups so popular in the sixties led him to devise a revolutionary structure for his new dog food plant. He ignored traditional assembly lines, staffed by bored and disgruntled workers, in favor of teams of technicians who had to understand and take responsibility for their work - a radical concept then, and radical even by today's standards." "Although these heretics were underappreciated in their time - and often fired or demoted for their radical ideas - the ideals they fought for live on in the ever-changing American corporation. Only by understanding their struggle can today's corporate leaders succeed in changing business for the better."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Library Journal Review

The heretics that concern Kleiner, most recently an editor for The Whole Earth Catalog, are modern-day dissidents working for U.S. companies who chose to advocate change during the 1960s and 1970s. The changes ranged from experimental plants to new corporate boardroom philosophies. GM especially illustrated the latter when it nominated to its board of directors Rev. Leon Sullivan, who subsequently became "one of the key figures of corporate change." Like religious heretics, corporate heretics have encountered resistance to their new ideas, and some saw their careers effectively destroyed. But out of these new ideas came such concepts as management teams, the pursuit of excellence, the striving for corporate social responsibility, and shareholder activism. While Kleiner's book is packed with the names of corporate heretics, some of them are not clearly identified and their contribution to the corporate change movement is not really made clear. Recommended for larger academic libraries and collections with an interest in business history.‘Richard S. Drezen, Washington Post News Research Ctr., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Kleiner's freewheeling portrait gallery focuses on corporate mavericks of the 1950s, '60s and '70s who pioneered self-managing work teams, responsiveness to customers, grassroots organizing and other ways to imbue corporations with a sense of the value of human relationships. Starting with British management scientist Eric Trist, whose experiments in industrial democracy in the 1940s laid the groundwork for U.S. managerial innovations of the 1980s, Kleiner afterward profiles General Foods manager Lyman Ketchum, who launched the work-team concept at a Topeka pet-food plant in the early 1970s; he then discusses how Royal Dutch/Shell in England switched from rigid numbers-based forecasting to "scenario planning," a method of predicting alternative patterns of global energy demand. Also spotlighted are MIT computer scientist Jay Forrester's design of the "Limits of Growth" model of the world's economic future; community/labor organizer Saul Alinsky's drive to change Kodak's hiring policies; and Stanford Research Institute engineer Willis Harman's parapsychology experiments and his campaign urging the federal government to adopt an ecological ethic. Kleiner, a freelance business reporter who has edited The Whole Earth Catalog, serves up a smorgasbord of status quo-changing ideas. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Kleiner is a freelance business writer who has also been a contributing editor for Whole Earth Review. In addition, he was a coauthor of organizational learning guru Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994). Kleiner has compiled here a history of contemporary management ideas dating from World War II. Many of these ideas evolved from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions and from humanistic psychology, and were in reaction to concepts such as Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" that had dominated management thinking to that point. Kleiner portrays the advocates of these "new" ideas as heretics because, primarily during the 1950s and 1960s, when they became most active, they chose to fight for change "within the system" rather than "dropping out" as did many of their counterparts. Kleiner suggests that such now widely accepted notions as corporate social responsibility and organizational teams grew out of their heretical ideas, and, by focusing on the individuals involved, he has constructed a lively, readable account. --David Rouse