Charles Leadbetter on the We-Think Economy

Charles Leadbetter is writing what should be an interesting book on the We Think economy. An excerpt from his column in The Times of London:

From YouTube to Wikipedia, collective creativity and collaboration are replacing top-down management as a business model. Our correspondent believes the We-Think phenomenon will affect every area of our lives.[…]

Traditionally, workers can be instructed, organised in a division of labour. Participants will not be led and organised in this way: the dominant ethos of the We-Think economy is democratic and egalitarian. These vast communities of participation are led by antiheroic, slight leaders — the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Linus Torvalds of Linux. Such people are the antithesis of the charismatic, harddriving chief executive in the Jack Welch mould.[…]


We are told that for order to be maintained someone has to be in control. Yet these activities seem ordered precisely because no one seeks to be in control, so people have to exercise their sense of responsibility — adjusting to one another, sorting out disputes as they go. The order comes from within, not from the top. To get complex tasks done reliably we have assumed that we need a clear division of labour. Yet in these non-organisations people seem voluntarily to find their own niches and distribute themselves to work as and when it needs doing
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