We-Think

The Power of Mass Creativity

Charles Leadbeater

ISBN 1861978928

ISBN 13 9781861978929

February 2008

Price £12.99

Paperback, 256 pp.

Buy this book at amazon.co.uk

View quote sheet

Subject: Current Affairs

Other formats available: Paperback

We-think is about what the rise of these phenomena (not all to do with the internet) means for the way we organise ourselves – not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators.

This is a huge cultural shift, for in this new economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part. In We-think Charles Leadbeater analyses not only these changes, but how they will affect us and how we can make the most of them. Just as, in the 1980s, his In Search of Work predicted the rise of more flexible employment, here he outlines a crucial shift that is already affecting all of us.

‘...‘this is a highly accessible and stimulating introduction to a set of trends that are still very much in their early stages. We should all be thinking a lot harder about where they will lead. ’
— www.charliebeckett.org

‘Likely to be the most controversial book about the Internet to be published in Britain this year…. A highly readable British synthesis of James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds and Chris Anderson's Long Tail, Leadbeater's We-Think is definitely an important book, even for skeptics like me who are suspicious of the seductive techno-utopian promises of the Web 2.0 revolution.’
— Andrew Keen, Independent