Corporate-finance

_The Age of Unreason_ isn't about predicting the future, it's about training yourself to look at the future in ways that you might otherwise not have done. As such, I found it a valuable and interesting book which is clearly based in a lot of meditation on learning and learning theories.

Some of the things Handy mentioned turned out to have become true since the book was written. Other things didn't-- but it doesn't matter ultimately. What the book asks is this: Can you recognize the real causes for pain that you identify? Can you think differently to force discontinuous change? Is your vision of the future based on an accurate perception of the past, or are you looking past major factors because you don't recognize the role of gradual change?

People who like this book may like some of the books on developing strategies using scenario exercises. This book also contains a decent (if dated) bibliography.

I may be influenced by, my privilege of having lived in England from the mid seventies thru early eighties. He particularly acknowledges the former Labor Party, Tony Benn. This "socialist" even frightened moderate laborites of its time. Another one of those he acknowlges is former Vice President Al Gore, and for Mayor of New York, Mayor Dinkins. As a resident and taxpayer of New York, I know the true David Dinkins !

He correctly points out that Microsoft Corporation is merely "intelectual Property". I agree with him. Later on, he rambles on that ownership of Corporations and business's should be overhauled.

We can all learn from Japan and Germany, and without Japan the US Auto Industry would still be producing thousands upon thousands of junk. However, his reasons that British and American Society should adapt the German and Japanese systems are a joke. In reality, much which was implemented in the 80's in both UK and US is now hurriedly being copied in Germany.

His Chinese Contract is not even worth the time to comment on it !

Other than a few pages of real practicality and common sense, this book is nothing more than left wing rambling and nonsense

He says it is about time we paid the third world a fair price for their trees. I insist must replant trees, we must reduce the amount of paper we comsume. Culprits must not get off the hook. This,in my opinion, is essential whatever ones political beliefs. This paperback is about 320 pages. It is a pity so many trees have to be torn down and the end result is this junk

Because it's terrific. And because the bland façade is disguising a remarkable reality. The Age of Heretics offers one of the few compelling, intelligent, thoroughly researched histories of the field of organizational development. Focusing largely on the 1960s and 1970s, Art Kleiner details the origins of T-Groups, Theory X and Theory Y, scenario planning, systems thinking, and much more. He proves particularly adept at summarizing an approach or technique succinctly, as if in passing, and all the while in the context of corporate change movements. Perhaps Kleiner errs on the side of the Great Man Theory of History ("there was one man who could do it, and his name was ..."), but he does demonstrate how OD can prove revolutionary to the modern corporation. And we all know what fate befalls the revolutionary.

For that is part of Kleiner's history: how the OD early adopters so often sowed the seeds of their own downfall. Perhaps they evolved from enthusiastic to monomaniacal. Perhaps they exacerbated their cultish image by experimenting with LSD. Perhaps they merely stepped on the wrong toes. Whatever the reason, the drugs or the shoes, they blew their own trumpets, then whimpered the blues.

As the title suggests, Kleiner dubs these forerunners "heretics," and even adopts a framework of comparisons to medieval knights, millenarians, Pelagians, and the like. The comparisons don't do any harm, and may even add a soupcon of panache, although a few are a stretch. Likening twelfth-century intellectual Peter Abelard to pharmaceutically enhanced 1960s visionaries does the great philosopher a disservice, not least because he's not an ideal model of universalism and holistic thinking. One might also argue that Kleiner misrepresents Parzival's dilemma when he writes of the plight of the OD consultant who fears to lose his job. Parzival encounters an obviously suffering king and must decide whether to ask "what afflicts thee?"; the consultant encounters an organization and must first recognize that there is any affliction in the first place.

Such criticisms are minor and admiring. The Age of Heretics is what the English like to call "a rollicking good read": fast-paced, persuasive, and written for adults, not sixth-graders. (Rare is the business author who would think to describe In Search of Excellence, accurately, as Manichaean.) This is not a book for generic "corporate leaders." It's for OD professionals and agents of change. If you pitch your tent in either camp, bring this book along for companionship.

The Age of Heretics is almost unfairly engrossing (I read it in a single sitting). Its superb and nuanced documentation at times reads almost like an additional narrative. And Kleiner's wonderfully accessible writing makes this intellectual history of organizational development speak to those otherwise put off by the cerebral work.

Oddly, those most in need of a recovery of revolutionary spirit or heretical passion - contemporary OD/MD/HR executives- won't read it. After all, even though interesting history, it is still history and those folks are now too busy figuring out what happy face button everyone can wear for the fiscal quarter. On my read, this is the lesson of Kleiner's history; that is, abandoning the revolutionary, hopeful,Pelagian spirit and resignation to work within the system enables the system to eat you.

Also oddly, Kleiner's history will likely be dismissed by socially conscious and critically-minded business/organization/management Marxist academics, as just not explicitly critical enough of the "one-dimensionality," technocracy and precipitous consumerism of the capitalist system, which is of course what identifies the work of McGregor, Lewin and the early NTL'ers as heresy. The lesson from Kleiner's work here is that even small scale revolutionary efforts establish precedents for larger ones, and that it's better to try something than simply continue to pontificate - as academics devoted to studying the corporate organization critically are prone to do.

Consequently, both groups miss a valuable history of the connection between the serious committed efforts to change society through corporate transformation by these early renegades and the larger macro socio-philosiohical pronouncements of counterculture theorists. Indeed, Kleiner's book is voraciously consumed by an audience with a particular spirit. Unfortunately, that is few of us. I suspect I speak for all of us in that audience in suggesting that the sequel - The Hour of Reconstruction - is eagerly awaited.

Were companies to examine their own assumptions on hiring and firing, they would find a pervasive and self-destructive premise: old is bad. But as Beverly Goldberg argues in _Age Works_, employers - indeed, society as a whole - have built this premise on an ill-considered, ill-defined congeries of prejudices and presuppositions. Believe it or not, Americans age 55 and above take fewer sick days, adapt to new technologies successfully, and are more loyal to their employer than are their colleagues thirty years younger. And perhaps more importantly, they may be the only untapped workforce available. As hidebound organizations throw fortunes at untested youth, others more far-seeing (including Travelers, GTE, and Baxter Health Care) actively recruit, train, and depend upon senior workers. In a shrinking labor market, corporations and their HR departments may find a surprising competitive advantage in coaxing older employees away from the brink of an often sterile and impoverished retirement.

Eager to dismiss this challenge to their standard practices, naysayers and doomsayers will demand proof. Fortunately _Age Works_ reads more like a position paper than a business book, and like any good position paper, it's loaded with facts. Age Works is the ideal volume for anyone itching for a statistical analysis of the American workforce 1950-2050, in all its hues and strata. Arguably Goldberg's love of statistics verges on addiction, but in the pharmacy of authorial dependence, statistics are a pretty benign habit. More distracting, although again less than fatal, is the book's policy-wonk style. Goldberg stands foursquare in the school of tell-'em-what-you're-going-to-tell-'em, tell-'em-, tell-'em-what-you-told-'em, and _Age Works_ sometimes reads like an executive summary that cannot bear to end.

Nonetheless, _Age Works_ is a cogent, serious, undeniably well-supported piece. Even those who resist the proposed solutions (admittedly the book's weakest section) will find the diagnosis difficult to dispute. Like it or not, America's workforce will continue to grow smaller and grayer over the next twenty years. And by the time the population bounces back, corporations' hiring practices will have appealed to all ages - or to none.

If you know and love Mr. Stern, the book will add many amusing anecdotes to your story of tales about this peripatetic self promoter.

Mr. Stern was originally known for visiting CEOs and telling them that "earnings per share don't count." That was a novel message to CEOs who usually got their bonuses for meeting budget targets for earnings. Intrigued by the comment, Mr. Stern would usually go on to explain that the stock market was highly efficient and followed the lead of "steers" like Warren Buffett who knew how to assess the economic effectiveness of an organization's performance. The book contains a copy of an early op-ed piece he wrote to explain his ideas.

What Mr. Stern wanted people to do was to focus on making the cash flow of their organizations that they did not have to reinvest grow ("free cash flow"). Turned into English, he wanted companies to make more money with their investments and invest as little as possible. He now characterizes that concept as "heresy." That's strange since businesses have been employing discounted cash flow as a discipline to making new investments since around 1890.

Since then, Mr. Stern has worked with his colleagues at Stern Stewart (his financial consulting firm) to turn these concepts into elaborate measures of economic performance called EVA and MVA that adjust for the cost of capital (something that has been around since the Capital Asset Pricing Model was introduced many decades ago). Mr. Stern also thinks of this as "heresy."

Few others than CEOs would have heard of Mr. Stern if he didn't constantly teach, speak and write about his work. The book has some elements of Adventure Capitalist as he describes his nomadic life.

His main prominence occurred after 1993 when Fortune Magazine made him the feature of a cover story. Why did Fortune do that? The book doesn't tell, but I once asked a friend who is an editor there. Stern Stewart was a tiny firm at the time, and barely breaking even (as Mr. Stern acknowledges in this book). The ideas were ones that had been around in academia for decades. What was so special? The editor told me that Roberto Goizueta, then chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, had written to suggest the idea. Since Fortune had never received a letter like that from a CEO, they felt that they had to write the article. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Mr. Goizueta typically spent more than half his day writing letters to analysts and publications to get more exposure for his company's stock. Since then, Mr. Stern's firm continues to be published annually in Fortune, and prominent Fortune editors appear at his marketing conferences.

In that story, you get the essence of the book. Mr. Stern is a genius at persuading high profile people to endorse him and his work and help promote his career. This began while he was at Chase Manhattan Bank. I first met him in 1975 after the lending officer to our Fortune 200 company suggested we hire Mr. Stern to come speak to us. At the end of the presentation after Mr. Stern left, his internal sponsor in our company noted that Chase Manhattan did not use his concepts.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Stern eventually left Chase to start his own firm in 1982. Since then, his contribution has been to take the two groups of executives in our society who read the least (CEOs and CFOs) and teach them about the financial theory that is taught in every business school in the world. Before you dismiss that contribution, remember Peter Drucker's advice: There is no single measure of company performance that is any good. You should add more and use them all. In that vein, Mr. Stern has helped. He now has many competitors who provide reasonably similar versions of the same measurements.

If you want to know more about these measures, read The Quest for Value by Bennett Stewart rather than this book.

The most controversial part of his work is a compensation method based on EVA. I was amused to find out from this book that Stern Stewart does not use this method for its own compensation, although EVA is one part of the compensation determination.

If you are interested in how to be a high-profile consultant in the world of finance, you will get a good sense of the type of networking among academia, finance and senior executives that is required. If you want to live that nomadic life, cut off from your family, then the world is yours.

This book helped me to support and reassure many of my employees, which resulted in lower rates of turn-over and higher productivity during stressful times of change and uncertainty.

The model is simple and yet powerful. I found myself doing a self-examination and applying it at home with my children. It will take some time to master the techniques and I'm optimistic it will greatly assist us with future corporate changes.

It's my intention to put together a training program for the entire company as it will help everyone better face business and personal change.