[...]... place as we write this book) are reshaping the world in which we live and work In fact, they are revolutionizing it The outcome of this fact is that the balance of power in the business world is shifting In very short order, the theory of the firm is going to be turned on its head The parts are about to become greater than the sum And you are one of the parts In the new corporate world, every part will be... scheme This initiated a torrent of reform – the virtual atomization of the Church – not because of Luther’s zeal but because the printing press had made the Bible available to anyone who could read The power of the priests had been broken (more on this in Chapter 13) In today’s world, the corporation and not the Church is the institution at the centre of most of our lives And the corporate world is now... in the cost of doing business, and that necessarily undermines the need to be big (more on this in Chapter 3) Like most revolutions, the effects of the Internet will be greater than we expected, but will take longer to appear We used to believe that the clarion calls of e -business would bring down the walls of the corporation on their own, but something got there first: outsourcing The business of ‘transformational’... corporation The corporation’s last remaining monopoly power is created by the inefficiency of the labour market, which prevents individuals from seeking new jobs as easily as they do new cars The Net is changing this rapidly, to the benefit of the most talented individuals As Charles Handy says, the big challenge for the elephants is that they don’t end up as the home for the second rate’ The corporation... because there will be no more ‘machine’ We call these parts ‘atoms’, and the seeds of the atomic corporation are already growing The huge, unwieldy companies of today are composed of atoms, just as companies in the future will be But today, the atoms are aggregated in a complex corporate environment that serves to stifle their effectiveness and ability to innovate In the future world, the world of the Atomic. .. agents, bound together by their shared mastery of new networking technology and an equally shared set of values about knowledge, relationships and competition, invented an economy perfect for the rapid proliferation of information-based, non-capital-intensive businesses – this was the early niche The collapse of many of these businesses has not wiped out this way of working, only the recent approach... extract value from the assets they have built, they must understand the source of the power of the insurgents and the forms the alternatives may take This book is a guide to transforming the value locked within the corporation into a new form, adapted to the connected economy and able to continue adapting on its own It illustrates a challenge that will face every corporate leader in the decade to come... over the next ten years Rather than picking this or that trend, declaring it universal and extrapolating it, they have created a chemistry of enterprise, allowing atomic engineers all over the economy to start making their own new compounds, testing them, and determining those that are the most promising They have got the crucial drivers absolutely right: connectivity replacing many of the advantages of. .. in a moment of inspired vision, but also in an extensive research project xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With regard to the latter – our research – the foundations of this book are varied and all equally critical They include the outcome of various studies that the authors have been involved with over a number of years with a variety of partners They also include a study of the works of a number of our peers... intellectual capital; the emergence of new types of entities But, above all, they have signalled a critical change in perspective, from an economy of monolithic and self-contained institutions looking at life from the top down, to a network of atomic entities constantly forming new relationships and creating value from the bottom up In this their latest book, they lay out both the periodic table of elements . 26/09/2003, 14:48:08 ATOMIC 00atompre.indd i 26/09/2003, 14:48:05 00atompre.indd ii 26/09/2003, 14:48:06 ATOMIC Reforming the Business Landscape into the New Structures of Tomorrow Roger Camrass. the source of the power of the insurgents and the forms the alternatives may take. This book is a guide to transforming the value locked within the corporation into a new form, adapted to the. that of Paul Mellon, the founder of the bank that funded US Steel. The growth of the banking system and the ability to fund industrial-scale projects were enabled by the development of the