Every organization always operates on behalf of the perceived needs and priorities of some core group of key people. This purpose will trump every other organizational loyalty, including those to shareholders, employees, customers, and other constituents.
- The World Question Center, Edge, Art Kleiner

We all know it's true. Underneath the rhetoric about customers, shareholders and employees lies a stark organizational reality. There is a group at the center of every organization that is the beating heart and mind. Their wishes and beliefs are the direction of the operation. Internal politics all boil down to satisfying them. Rational decision makers need not apply or, if they do, they must be willing to conform to the atmospheric group think.

So goes the central premise of Art Kleiner's book: Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success. In some ways, the work is the answer to questions raised in Kleiner's earlier tome The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change. Why do our institutions require outlying thinkers? Because there is a core group at the heart of the business.

A key collaborator with Peter Senge (of 5th Discipline Fame), Kleiner has investigated the innards of a huge number of businesses. Time and again he came away knowing that there was an incongruity between rational decision making and the behavior of the entity. This book looks at management as it is rather than the more traditional view of the way things should be.

Success within an organization is a function of being perceived as either important to or effective for this core group. Professional excellence, the performance of specific duties and/or effectiveness in any other terms are matters of personal fulfillment. Longevity is acquired through utility or importance to the core group. Period. 

-John Sumser