The age of heretics - Art Kleiner

This is a cultural history of postwar business. It shows how the corporate mavericks of the 1950s, 60s and 70s 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 US managerial innovations of the 1980s, the book then profiles General Foods manager Lyman Ketchum, who launched the work-team concept at a Topeka pet-food plant in the early 1970s.;There is a discussion of 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 to growth" model of the world's economic future, community/labour organizer Saul Alinsky's drive to change Kodak's hiring policies, and Stanford Research Research Institute engineer Willis Harman's parapsychological experiments and his campaign urging the federal government to adopt an ecological ethic.;Although these heretics were underappreciated in their time- and often fired or demoted for their radical ideas - the ideas they fought for live on in the ever-changing corporation. Only by understanding their struggle can today's corporate leaders succeed in changing business for the better. Art Kleiner is the co-author of "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook".