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What do you do to earn your living?
Can it be weighed, measured or touched?
For most people the answer is no. You probably provide a
service, analyze information and make judgments about it.
More and more of us make our living from our ideas and our
know-how. We live in a weightless society.
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. Perhaps most
compellingly, he shows how the same principles are being
applied in the public sector. 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.
Thoughtful, inspired and witty, Leadbeater
provides readers with the myths of the new economy, shows
when ignorance works, and takes them to the Burgess Shale
in the Canadian Rockies to demonstrate evolutionary innovation.
Readable and thought-provoking, The Weightless
Society offers a call to take a fresh look at our potential.
It's for anyone concerned about the future of his or her
job, community, and economy in the global information age.
Charles Leadbeater is a writer, Demos
research associate, and consultant to leading companies.
He is a member of the British government's competitiveness
council and an advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair's Downing
Street Policy Unit. Leadbeater studied politics, philosophy,
and economics at Balliol College, Oxford. A former editor
and Tokyo Business Chief at The Financial Times before
moving to the Independent, where he devised Bridget
Jones's Diary with Helen Fielding. He can be contacted
at charlie@malvernrd.demon.co.uk.
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