|
THE SUPPORT ECONOMY Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism By Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin Publisher: Viking/Penguin ISBN: 0-670-88736-6 "THE SUPPORT ECONOMY is a dazzling display of intellect with heart -- brilliant, important, and sound. Read it or be left behind in the dust." --Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence "A profound book that will affect the future of business practice." --Thomas K.McCraw, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Harvard Business School "A daring attempt to reconceive the way that business is done." -- Keith H. Hammonds, Fast Company TWO NO-NONSENSE VISIONARIES OFFER REVOLUTIONARY PRESCRIPTION FOR THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY Today's capitalism is in crisis. Senior managers plunder billions of dollars while shareholders end up with nothing. Employee retirement accounts are in disarray. Customer satisfaction is at an all time low. "The current model of managerial capitalism is dying. We are at the threshold of a new era of capitalism," say Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, authors of the new book THE SUPPORT ECONOMY. The main premise of the book is that people have changed far more than the corporations upon which they depend. The chasm that now separates individuals and organizations is marked by deep frustration and mistrust, but it also harbors the possibility of revolutionary economic growth. THE SUPPORT ECONOMY is the first book to identify the vast new opportunities for wealth creation arising out of today's social and technological realities. Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor who wrote the landmark book In the Age of the Smart Machine, and her husband, Jim Maxmin, a turnaround expert and former CEO of such companies as Volvo-UK, Thorn Home Electronics, and Laura Ashley, have spent the last decade analyzing the underlying issues that have surfaced in today's corporate crisis. They argue that our society is radically different from the one in which our current form of capitalism (managerial capitalism) was invented. For the first time in history, there are millions of people who experience themselves as unique individuals with a deep yearning for psychological self-determination. They are in search of more than mere goods and services. In fact, they seek something that corporations have not even considered: tangible support for leading unique lives on their own terms. They want advocates not adversaries and relationships not anonymous transactions. What people want is "deep support," say Zuboff and Maxmin. Deep support is a fundamentally different approach to commerce, founded on the principles of a new capitalism (distributed capitalism) in which all value is located in the individual end consumer. With this shift, everything changes, including the ways we think about wealth creation, ownership, and control. As in the great political and social revolutions of the 18th century, when people went from being merely subjects to becoming active citizens, the shift to distributed capitalism means that the consumer is no longer a corporate subject, but the source of all value and all cash. In this new world, "federated support networks" are the new competitors. They leverage digital infrastructure to combine and integrate goods and services in the larger context of providing deep support at an affordable price. "Once these new kinds of commercial entities are invented, anyone who wants a share of the wealth will have to migrate to this new model. The rest will go the way of the buggy manufacturers of a century ago," say Zuboff and Maxmin. "This is precisely how capitalism renews itself." "People think the big kinds of changes that we discuss are either threatening or utopian," the authors continue. "But these ideas are about rescuing us from the stress and outrage of our lives as consumers and employees. Right now we are at a dead end. We wrote this book to propose a new course. The consequences of the changes we see emerging are profound and thrilling, even as they lead our economy toward the next great leap forward in wealth creation." THE SUPPORT ECONOMY is a powerful book that will catalyze wide-ranging debate and fresh ideas about the role of companies, the needs of individuals, and the implications for entrepreneurs, technologists, policy-makers, leaders, and citizens into the twenty-first century. Zuboff and Maxmin present a riveting vision that defies simple categorization. Shoshana Zuboff, Ph.D., is the critically acclaimed author of the classic work In the Age of the Smart Machine. Called "the prophet of the information age," she is a chaired professor at the Harvard Business School. She has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Business Week, and numerous other publications. James Maxmin, Ph.D., has been the CEO of Volvo-UK, Thorn Home Electronics, and Laura Ashley, founded the investment company Global Brand Development, and is currently advisory director to Mast Global. He has been featured in The Financial Times, Business Week, and other publications. |
||
close window | ||