We at tompeters.com are proud to say that Tom is included as one of the heretics of the title in The Age of Heretics, by Art Kleiner, the editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine. The book’s subtitle is A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, and leadership expert Warren Bennis, a friend of Tom’s, writes in the foreword that “… each of us helped destroy, if not the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the soulless organization that stole his labor and his days. And in doing so, each of us contributed to a new organizational reality in which the personal and business are inextricably linked and success is measured in human terms as well as dollars and euros.”
The heresies—business theorems that go against the flow of accepted opinion—which are endorsed in the book, include: “Business is always personal.” “To change an organization, you must know—and change—yourself.” “The purpose of an organization is to change the world.” Tom is mentioned in relation to that last one, as you might have guessed, and he, along with Bob Waterman, is credited with moving the heretics out into the open. Kleiner points out, by means of a quote from Thomas Huxley, that “New truths begin as heresies.” We think this is a book you’ll be glad to take a look at.