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Charles Leadbeater is an advisor to British officials, a research associate with a public-policy think tank, and a former editor of several respected publications. As such, he's had ample opportunity to view today's rapidly evolving high-tech world from the perspectives of both individuals and institutions. In The Weightless Society, he presents his insights on the social and economic implications of a time when "most of us make our money from thin air"--meaning, he explains, that we "produce nothing that can be weighed, touched or easily measured." His proposals for improving our personal and professional lives, peppered with references to such disparate figures as Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise (on the connection between an organization and the human brain) and Pope John Paul II (on the ownership of knowledge), are often revolutionary, but consistently viable nevertheless. A section on restructuring business to meet the requirements of managers, workers, customers, and investors, for example, concludes with a look at the "Personalized Company" that he sees attracting the "workforce of diverse talents" needed to succeed in this environment. Such creative, flexible, and performance-driven enterprises, he notes, would allow employees "to choose different approaches at different stages" while promoting "self management" and building "overlapping social contracts" among all stakeholders. Like the rest of this book, it makes sense--and makes you think. --Howard Rothman The Weightless Society shows why entrepreneurship will become a mass activity, companies will need to be structured as if they were brains, ownership must be broadly spread, networks will become the main way of organizing the knowledge economy, and truth and collaboration will be the new ethics of the new economy.
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