The Age of Heretics A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management

Radical behavior is rarely acknowledged as a characteristic of the corporate world, where status quo is generally king and revolutionary thought usually banished to the fringes. This book shows that a powerful group of progressive thinkers really did develop within the realm of traditional business during the tumultuous 1960s. These figures actually helped transform that environment just as their better-known antiestablishment allies were reshaping other institutions throughout society. In 1996, when The Age of Heretics was first published, it was read and reviewed by a devoted audience. They saw in it a bolstering and expansion of their own efforts to understand and reform the modern-day corporation. And today, even though it is out of print, there is still a strong community of followers in the business community who demand the book. The world is in a different place than it was in 1996. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , along with the failures of many companies after the dot-com bubble burst, have explicitly demonstrated the importance of good management in achieving results - and how countercultural good management can be in many settings. The evolution of the World Wide Web, the successes of open-system projects like Linux, the growing importance of corporate environmentalism, the increased cachet of high-performance management, and the need of global enterprises to implement cross-boundary initiatives have all brought legitimacy to management approaches that would have been unthinkable in most companies fifteen years ago. This edition will update and expand on the success of the first edition.