| What
do you make to earn your living? Do you make anything tangible
that can be weighed, measured or touched? For most people
the answer is no. You probably provide a service -- teaching,
accounting, retailing or consulting -- or maybe you analyse
information and like judgements about it. More and more of
us make our livings from thin air - from our ideas and our
know-how.
This is because knowledge is becoming the
most creative force in the modern economy, spawning new
products, services and industries, forms of communications,
types of food and treatments for illness. In old capitalism,
the critical assets were raw materials, land, labour and
machinery. In the new capitalism, the raw materials are
know-how, creativity, ingenuity and imagination. Our generation
is the beneficiary of unprecedented flows of knowledge from
science and education, and we are equipped in ever more
powerful ways to share and combine our know-how through
communications. As a result, the opportunities for growth
are boundless. But this new economy is perilous as well
as powerful. An economy driven by creativity should be more
humane. Instead, most of us feel our economic lives are
out of control, dominated by soulless financial markets
and clouded by the insecurities bred by corporate downsizing.
Living on Thin Air is about how we
can create an environment that is both innovative and inclusive.
Our societies should be organized around the creation of
knowledge capital and social capital, rather than being
dominated by the power of financial capital. Drawing on
research in California, Japan, Germany and the Far East,
Charles Leadbeater shows how we can create communities of
competition, in which we collaborate to compete in the global
economy.
The book sets out a New Constitution for
the New Economy that 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 trust and collaboration will be the new ethics of the
new economy. Leadbeater argues for a radical overhaul of
corporate and government institutions inherited from the
industrial era which are ill suited to the knowledge economy,
including new approaches to measuring economic value, taxation
and social entrepreneurship.
Charles Leadbeter is an independent writer,
Demos research associate and consultant to leading companies.
He was Industrial Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief at the Financial
Times before moving to the Independent, where he devised
Bridget Jones's Diary with Helen Fielding.
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