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Friday 10 February 2012

Charlie does surf. Meet the new wizard of the web

Charles Leadbeater tells Matthew d’Ancona about the riches to be mined from online collaboration — and says that the Conservatives have a chance to launch a new form of politics

Here he quotes from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: ‘What are the advantages which we propose to gain by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation, are all the advantages we can propose to derive from it.’

This is not to say, of course, that the old models of the investor-owned company, the professions, private information or commercial hierarchies, are doomed, and that we will all wake up one day working in a global e-commune. Rather, that success will lie in finding the correct balance between old and new. ‘The trick,’ he says, ‘will be to find the right ways to combine professional and amateur, open and collaborative ways of working with more traditional and closed approaches... The most exciting organisational models of the future will mix collaboration and commerce, community and corporation... The road to prosperity in a world shaped by the web will lie in the interaction between gifts and transactions, sharing and owning; between markets that trade products and communities that breed knowledge.’

Leadbeater, a bespectacled, quietly compelling presence, has gone through several incarnations in his 49 years, earning his spurs at Weekend World in the era of Brian Walden, Peter Mandelson and David Aaronovitch. He worked at the Financial Times and the Independent, where he launched Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, and was closely associated with the Blair Project, both as an adviser and as a stalwart of the think-tank Demos. These days, as one of the most respected management thinkers in the world, he is still well-connected with the key players in the government. In the acknowledgments to the book he thanks the brothers Miliband, David and Ed.

But it is not only Cabinet ministers to whom Leadbeater is indebted. In a classic example of web collaboration, he drafted the book online, inviting comment and criticism from anyone who cared to join in. As a result, the full author byline of We-Think is ‘Charles Leadbeater (and 257 other people)’.

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