Invisible Wealth Prospectus

Purpose

The purpose of this book is to shed light on the seldom "explicitly" accessed interactive triad of organizational success factors—self-organization, social capital, and tacit knowledge. Once people grasp the fact that individuals and groups are constantly self-organizing and that the process can't be strictly controlled, they will be able to design enterprises that are able to support the formation and functioning of these emergent systems unobtrusively. Knowing how to access and leverage these powerful forces will give any organization a much greater prospect to succeed in the turbulent global landscape.

Essentially, Invisible Wealth presents a clear and comprehensive system for increasing an organization's capacity for generating intellectual capital (or new knowledge) and for maximizing overall "voluntary" collaboration. Clearly, only the spawning of increased levels of innovation will provide companies in industrialized nations a competitive edge in the future since low wages not only of blue-collar employees but also of highly educated and skilled personnel in less developed countries are forcing businesses to take their work off-shore at an ever accelerating pace.

Certainly, businesses have become less bureaucratic in the last few decades. However, the efforts made to "empower" individuals and teams at all levels of organizations, to say the least, has been dismal. Central to the problem is the lack of models other than the standard prototypes for command-and-control systems. Unfortunately, the generation of knowledge is particularly dependent on voluntary collaboration and self-determination, foreign to the Industrial Age management mind-set.

Consequently, companies have no working models to follow for implementing "truly democratic" or self-organizing systems needed to increase the innovative capacity, productivity and commitment of knowledge workers. I believe I have developed precisely such a fundamental template which focuses on the informal or emergent social networks where, ironically, most of the work in organizations is accomplished in the first place.

Foundation