The Support Economy

Shoshana Zuboff wrote an amazing book called The Support Economy (www.thesupporteconomy.com).

It contains principles and insights that could give LinkedIn users a secret edge in maximizing the value they get from LinkedIn or other sociotechnical networking service.

For example, she says transaction-based capitalism is on its way out, and that relationship-based capitalism is the next episode.

She doesn't mean relationship in the sense of "customer relationship management," but in the sense of every consumer becoming the center of a "federated support network" of companies that collaborate in order to provide "deep support" to that customer.

This book is definitely a must-read for anyone who is serious about networking in the new economy/society, and how to profit from the current transformation of capitalism into a more compassionate, humane and people-centered version.

Something is going on!

Tom Friedman wrote the best-seller The World is Flat, in which he says that every worker in North America is now competing against the smart and hungry workers of India and China (and there are roughly 3 billion of them).

His message is so powerful that even the Bush administration is listening to him.

But there's something else going on, which I can't yet put my finger on. It's about the Web 2.0, which enables people to interact DIRECTLY with millions of other people on the other side of the planet and to collaborate in open-source projects.

Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/) is one such example.

Then, there's PayPal, which enables anyone to pay anyone else who has a PayPal account (which is free to create).There's also this RSS thing, which enables a person to subscribe to a blog (like this one) and receive daily emails containing recently uploaded postings.

When I mix all the above trends together, I can't help but conclude that:

1. Knowledge is power
2. Power is money
3. Therefore, in the new economy, smart people will be very rich

The key is to build, RIGHT NOW, the social network through which one can circulate (usually digital) knowledge products.

Yet most people still have the employee mentality. They still think that having a job is security enough. (BCE just laid off 4,000 workers this week, by the way).

I think it is a severe mistake, professionally and economically, not to network seriously.

More later...