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A spirited and groundbreaking book in the tradition of such futuristic bestsellers as Megatrends, The Year 2000, and Future Shock: Forget supply and demand. Forget computers. The old rules are broken. Today communication, not computation, drives change. We are rushing into a world where connectivity is everything, and where old business know-how means nothing. In this new economic order, success flows primarily from understanding networks, and networks have their own rules. In New Rules for the New Economy, Kelly presents ten fundamental principles of the connected economy that invert the traditional wisdom of the industrial world. Succinct and memorable, New Rules explains why these powerful laws are already hardwired into the new economy, and how they play out in all kinds of business--both low and high tech--all over the world. More than an overview of new economic principles, it prescribes clear and specific strategies for success in the network economy. For any worker, CEO, or middle manager, New Rules is the survival kit for the new economy. * Penguin Readers Guide Bound into Every Book * A Business Week bestseller for eight weeks From Kirkus Reviews: A look at the future through a rose-tinted crystal computer monitor. It's amazing how one person's nightmare can make someone else giddy. Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, gleefully looks forward to a "new global economic culture" that is characterized, "most important[ly], by a widespread reliance on economic values as the basis for making decisions in all walks of life." Confronted with extensive alienation from noneconomic human life, Kelly advises us to accept the inevitable and join the electronically induced information age; only those failing to heed the siren call of cyberspace will encounter difficulties. Fortunately, Kelly provides ten rules to guide us on our way in the new economic order, essentially asserting that the entire world will soon look like the current World Wide Web - where power multiplies through connections, maintaining the network is crucial, change is constant, and even successful innovations are quickly left behind - and insisting that we must accept risk and act boldly. The possibilities are tremendous, for we are "about to witness an explosion of entities built on relationships and technology that will rival the early days of life on Earth in their variety." It's also possible that Kelly is a bit overenthusiastic. He offers no guarantees, of course, but in the new alchemy of the future, it is abundance, not scarcity, that creates value, and concerns with, for instance, distribution of resources, equal opportunity, or the fate of individuals and nations not "hardwired" into this new reality are barely worth mentioning. For the doubters unable to block out thoughts about the victims of Kelly's future, however, there is some comfort. As he recognizes, predictions based on a selective reading of current trends are notoriously inaccurate, and all that differentiates his prognostications from failures of the past is that time has not yet proven him wrong. Let's hope it does so in a manner that discourages further soothsaying.
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