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Book: Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work
Author: Debra L. Meyerson
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Price: $24.95

Book: Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity
Author: by Ella L.J. Edmondson Bell and Stella M. Nkomo
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Price: $29.95

In the old days, balding white guys ruled the earth. Big business was their business: In most companies, even if you had the rare temerity not to be white, male, conservative, straight, and of a certain age, you still danced, more or less unquestioningly, to the tune they fiddled.

Today -- well, okay -- today, the balding white guys still hold sway. (Full disclosure: I'm one of them -- except for the baldness and the sway.) More and more, though, an insidious hodgepodge has infiltrated corporate America. There are women, of course. And blacks, Asians, gays, and lesbians. Baptists and Muslims. Even parents with young kids.

These people are different. They are outsiders. They surely don't rule the earth -- but they most assuredly threaten the existing BWG order. They threaten in seemingly small ways, in conversational snippets, in the nuances of daily decisions. Make no mistake, though: These outsiders are playing a different tune.

Ella L.J. Edmondson Bell, who teaches at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, recalls meeting with an East Coast bank's top executives who were trying to improve their record in hiring and retaining black women managers. "Who are they?" asked the CEO, sincerely perplexed by these people of difference. "Where do they fit?" This is what the BWGs wonder as they survey the changing human maps of their companies. Who are these people? Where do they fit? How do I understand them?

Here is help -- two books that, in very different ways, explore the motivations and methods of corporate outsiders. Debra L. Meyerson, a professor at Stanford University and Simmons College, brings us Tempered Radicals, a reckoning with people who work to make change against the prevailing organizational flow. Bell and Stella Nkomo of the UNISA Graduate School of Business Leadership in South Africa, present Our Separate Ways, exploring the differences between black and white women executives.

These books sprout from the same tree: Meyerson, Bell, and Nkomo have collaborated in the past, and they acknowledge each other's work. They cite many of the same sources from feminist and diversity literature. They even share the same editors at Harvard Business School Press, which is publishing the works within two months of each other.

More telling, both books are strikingly nontraditional by academic standards. They are very personal journeys rooted in their authors' experiences as outsiders in predominantly white male institutions. While both rely on reasonably scientific interviewing and surveying techniques, their telling comes as much from the heart as from the data.