Posted by Adam Gordon on Jan 23, 2009 in all, innovation, leadership, management, politics of the future | 0 comments
Review: The Age of Heretics, (2nd Edition), Art Kleiner, Jossey-Bass, 2008
One of the conundrums of foresight work is that it demands a macro-perspective, but real change requires focus. In order to get the breadth of view across society and technology to think adequately about the future, the futures analyst is forced to forgo much of the detail, while implementers are thinking: “this 40,000 ft view is very illuminating, but how do I land the plane?” What changes do I make, in my organization, in my industry, on Monday morning, and how do I not get fired for making them?
Kleiner’s updated The Age of Heretics, (2nd edition, Jossey-Bass, 2008) is the modern history of people who find themselves – or put themselves – on the focus side of foresight: who work practically on the ground inside corporate institutions to achieve change, which means by definition challenging the methods and perspectives of their institution. It is not the story of foresight at the lofty level of ideas, but the altogether grittier and more interesting story of how macro-change consciousness meets real institutions, real organizational dynamics, real industry pressures, and real career considerations, in the history of US corporations since 1945.
Kleiner, the editor-in-chief of Booz Allen’s Strategy+Business, is no stranger to the foresight field. He is the ghost-writer behind an eye-popping portion of the futures canon, including The Art of the Long View; The Fifth Discipline, and its Fieldbook; and The Living Company, and so on, (source: http://www.well.com/~art/) so it’s no surprise that the fabric of his text is lush in its familiarity with the players and ideas in the field.
The common thread he follows – through figures like Herman Kahn, Willis Harman, Amory Lovins, Oliver Markley, and so on, is that of the heretic, the maverick against the machine. Intriguingly, along the way, Kleiner gives us a worm’s-eye view of the genesis of many new management ideas, from “lean production” to the “balanced scorecard” to “scenario planning’ – showing how they emerge from and have been engendered by the forces of institutions in productive conflict with their heretics.
The political history of truth, and its future
Philosopher Michel Foucault catapulted our understanding of institutions as a political field, using insights from the history of prisons, hospitals, and asylums to show the relationship between power and knowledge in the evolution of institutional forms. But he never dealt with the modern business corporation. It may be overstating it, but not by much, to say that Kleiner updates Foucault for corporate America. The themes he carries: the role of the deviant, transgression, the evolution of truth, and discursive struggles between insiders and outsiders, are highly resonant. In his previous book, Who Really Matters (Doubleday, 2003) Kleiner developed other parts of this same perspective: showing how every organization’s identity and choices can be understood as driven by the interests of its core group – its powerful insiders.
The Age of Heretics is an engrossing history of change-agents in companies in strategic and organizational transformation. But it’s not just a history. In the future – while the names of the players, and their issues, and the institutions themselves will change, the productive articulation between the heretic and the institution will remain the format of change in big groups. So the lessons of the book are well taken and very highly recommended.
[This review, authored by Adam Gordon, first appeared in The Association of Professional Futurist's Compass Magazine]