Against an emerging landscape of intranets, extranets, virtual communities, and virtual reality, this book highlights the dangers of individuals or organizations becoming technology-rich but value blind. Valueware also champions the evolution of a gentler mode of capitalism as just one of many hopes for a more caring and sustainable 21st century. After detailing the critical forces now driving the convergence of technology, humanity, and organization, Barnatt then balances a wide spectrum of value perspectives, including those of past and present management gurus, Internet pioneers, and Generation Xers.
Knowledge-empowered individuals and organizations are already beginning to learn the value of global interdependence over independence. Cutting-edge technologies and new social structures may also soon empower more relationship-rich markets, which begin to mediate human affiliation via money but in a gentler capitalist structure. Barnatt doesn't claim to predict the world of tomorrow. However, by detailing alternative millennial realities from which key future-shapers may choose, it instead champions future gazing as future shaping.