Okay, I read this book purely for research purposes, and my reading was heavily influenced by those purposes: I was on the look out for managerial nonsense-speak, rather than a deep story. But Kleiner tells a good story about, in essence, how one very small group of post-war researchers suggested that employees would be happier and work better if they were (made to feel that they were) involved in the running of a company. He tells it at something enormous length--this is really an essay masquerading as a book)--but there are occasional gems. The allegory he tries to weave through the book isn't all that convincing, but then, he needed to organize it somehow, and there's no obvious way to do it. On the down-side, from my perspective, he's extraordinarily uncritical and almost messianic in his belief that corporations (which are bound *by law* to act in such a way as to maximize profits) could be responsible public institutions. And he writes, not unclearly, but too much. Really only for those who are already interested in the topic, but not so interested that they'd like to read an actual history of managerial practices. ( )

While you can quickly read this book, I find myself stopping often to reflect on the content and times in the past when I have often played the role of an organizational heretic. The history of management thinking over the last 60 years is also well laid out, better than any other attempt I have seen on how the various threads are inter-related both by key people leading the change in how management is conceived and the theories developed along the way. ( )