A Change Will Do You Good

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.

Of the two, Tempered Radicals is the more surprising -- and really, the more subversive. Meyerson lays out the analysis that she and Maureen Scully first tested in a 1995 paper (and that was described in the September 2000 issue of Fast Company). Tempered radicals, she writes, "are people who want to succeed in their organizations, yet want to live by their values or identities, even if they are somehow at odds with the dominant culture of their organizations."

The genius of this definition, of course, is that it appeals to so many of us. One tempered radical is Martha Wiley, who grants her employees flexible work schedules despite the absence of any corporate policy condoning such a practice. John Ziwak, a white manager at a high-tech company, turns down a business trip that conflicts with his parenting obligations. Alan Levy takes time off to observe Jewish holidays. Peter Grant uses his executive perch to quietly hire other minority managers.

Well, that doesn't sound so hard; we can be tempered radicals too! Ultimately, most of us want to stay true to our personal values -- and most of us work for organizations whose values aren't fully aligned with our own. To a greater or lesser extent, we suffer ambivalence as we attempt to navigate the gap. Our reactions may be very modest -- simply attempting to fit in while retaining bits of our identity. Or they may be quite strident, challenging the dominant culture in ways that demand deliberate change.