The rise of literal democracy at work, "where employees actually vote on who their managers will be."

I have just ordered myself Tom Malone's book The Future of Work after reading David Kirkpatrick's interview on Fortune via Howard.

Business rules are changing in an extreme way. I am using my blog as a business tool more and more and it works, I get incredible good contacts reading blogs, or via comments and emails. I get help from all European countries friends to launch Typepad in Europe (thanks !).

My feeling is that we should just forget about the old way of doing business, where people get power by protecting information and their networks. The basic rule of the new way of doing business is -I guess- that sharing information has much more value than protecting it.

Here is what Howard says about the book:

Democracy and freedom are coming to business, says Tom Malone. And it's all because of technology.

See in Fortune the interview David Kirkpatrick had with Tom Malone about his book The Future of Work.

HBR The Working Knowledge excerpted the book in 'Making the Decision to Decentralize'.

Malone teaches at MIT's Sloan School of Management and runs something called the Center for Coordination Science, which studies how technology changes the way people work. His new book, The Future of Work, posits that the central transformative development of our time is the radically decreased cost of communications caused by the Internet, wireless voice and data, and cheap long distance, among other new technologies. It is all fundamentally changing the nature of work, Malone says: "This change may be as important for business as the change to democracy has been for government." [Howard Rheingold]