Art Kleiner is a journalist, author, and editor who has served as editor-in-chief of strategy+business, the management journal published by Booz & Company (later PwC Strategy&). He is also the author of "The Age of Heretics" (1996, revised 2008), a history of management dissidents who challenged orthodox corporate thinking from the 1950s through the 1990s — a book that places Senge and the learning organization movement in the broader context of management innovation. His distinctive skill is translating complex organizational concepts into accessible, practically useful language for managers and practitioners.
Kleiner was a central collaborator in the Senge fieldbook project, co-authoring fifth-discipline-fieldbook-1994, dance-of-change-1999, and schools-that-learn-2000. His contribution was primarily editorial and structural: organizing the exercises, case studies, and frameworks contributed by multiple authors into coherent, navigable books. The fieldbook format itself — part conceptual text, part workbook, part anthology of practitioner stories — owes much to Kleiner's journalism background, which trained him to make ideas concrete through examples and to write for readers who are doing something, not just learning something.
peter-senge and Kleiner developed a sustained working partnership over more than a decade of fieldbook production. Kleiner's other major contribution to the field is his concept of the "core group" — the small set of people whose interests an organization implicitly serves — which he developed in "Who Really Matters" (2003). This concept complements Senge's systems thinking framework by explaining why leverage-points often fail: the system may be designed to serve the core group's interests rather than the organization's stated mission. Kleiner has remained a voice in the broader learning-organization conversation through his editorial work at strategy+business.