The Age of Heretics:

Heretics-Webinar-v5.ppt Copyright ©2009 Art Kleiner and strategy+business

Webinar Deck

The Age of Heretics:

Lessons from Three Generations of Management Thinkers Art Kleiner editor-in-chief strategy+business

February 24, 2008

Heretics-Webinar-v5.ppt Copyright ©2009 Art Kleiner and Booz & Company

The Age of Heretics: Lessons from Three Generations of Management Thinkers is based on the book The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management by Art Kleiner (San Francisco: Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2008) and on a series of “Creative Mind” and “Culture and Change” articles originally written for strategy+business.

Art Kleiner is editor-in-chief of strategy+business, the quarterly executive magazine published by Booz & Company. He is a writer and speaker specializing in business management, interactive media, corporate environmentalism, scenario planning, and organizational learning. His books include Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success (Doubleday, 2003). He is also the editorial director of the best-selling Fifth Discipline Fieldbook series, co-authored with Peter Senge.

For more information, or to subscribe to strategy+business, see the web site: http://www.strategy-business.com

Copyright © 2009 Booz & Company and Art Kleiner

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of the author.

This document provides an outline of presentation and is incomplete without the accompanying oral commentary and dialogue. These materials are licensed for use by one individual only and only in connection with the course in which the materials provided.

You can contact Art Kleiner at [email protected].


Imagine that the year is 1953, and you are the producer of a convivial, sophisticated, health-affirming product….


Do you tell the truth to the public at large? Or do you hide it from the public and yourself?


The pressure on the individual to avoid the truth is immense….

Real world

consequences feedback

Trial experiment

feedback

Social feedback


What does it take for an organization….

to systematically make it easier….

for people to make the kinds of decisions….

that will lead to better outcomes for the world….

and the organization itself….

in the right timeframe?


We know more about the answer than we think we do.

“Management is in the same state today that

the natural sciences were in before the

discovery of the circulation of the blood.”

-- Elliot Jaques

Joos van Craesbeck (1608- circa 1654/1662) is a Flemish

painter. He shows us here, preserved in a private

collection, the interior of a barber-surgeon’s office.






-- Elliot Jaques




There are a lot of barber-surgeons out there,

“fixing” organizational problems…






-- Elliot Jaques




There are a lot of barber-surgeons out there,

“fixing” organizational problems…

But there’s also a body of knowledge emerging, as the

industrial world reconfigures itself…


Many of the most valuable management ideas of today started out as countercultural:

Self-managing work-teams “Management by walking around” (ie direct observation) Human beings are essentially capable The future can’t be predicted…

…but it can be anticipated (ie scenario planning) A corporation’s fate is deeply entwined with the fate of its

community, employees, suppliers, and customers

And most of all….

Business is personal


A brief history of business: For centuries, it was so slow it had to be personal.


But as the technology allowed the speed of transactions to accelerate….


Industrialists could leave behind the vernacular of village and family and become “robber barons…”

Jay Gould

JD Rockefeller


They could create “scientific” organizations with “one best way” of managing the work….

Frederick Taylor


They could build far-flung giant organizations with calculations like ROI that compared human efforts across continents….

Donaldson Brown


And they could foster a culture where a deal was “nothing personal… it’s just business…”

Otto (“Abbadabba”) Berrnam


After World War II, amidst the rise of the “organization man,” a quiet yearning began for the spirit of community to return to the corporation….

…and a growing body of practice, and a set of heretical ideas, suggested that the most powerful way to govern an enterprise was with its spirit of community intact…


A heretic (in business) is a person who sees a truth

that contradicts conventional wisdom

and remains loyal to both entities:

the organization and the truth…


1946: Kurt Lewin and the founders of NTL The “experts” are the people closest to the insight.

Kurt Lewin, Frank Simpson, and

an unidentified man at the

Connecticut Workshop


People are basically trustworthy…. Early NTL session -

Lee Bradford, Alvin

Zander, Ken Benne,

Ron Lippitt, around

1954


Small groups hold the key to beneficial change….

Jane Mouton, around 1964

Warren Bennis, U. of Cincinnati, around 1974


1969: Lyman Ketchum and Ed Dulworth in Topeka, Kansas Self-managing teams in a well-designed operation are far more productive than command and control.

Ketchum

Dulworth


Many people in such an operation, if it’s well-designed, become committed to the future of the enterprise.


To make it work requires a systematic redesign of the whole organization, away from “controls,” “ROI as purpose,” “expectations,” toward intrinsic “joy in work.”

W. Edwards Deming


Both sides have gotten more sophisticated; the numbers culture and the vernacular culture now coexist….

Tom Johnson

Robert Kaplan


What does it take to be an effective heretic?

What does it take to create an organization in which people can be effective heretics?

How can we tell the difference between merely countercultural ideas -- and ideas which make enough of a difference… that we can stop being barber-surgeons?


Q & A


Additional Resources

To read more about Art Kleiner’s book, “The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers who Reinvented Management,” please use the following link: http://www.well.com/user/art/AofHtext.html

Slides and recording: A recording of the event will be posted at: http://www.strategy-business.com/webinars/archive

The Age of Heretics:

Documents

Transcript of The Age of Heretics: