New Rules for the New Economy. This thought is right on the money:

“We need to shift away from the notion of technology managing information and toward the idea of technology as a medium of relationships,” writes Michael Schrage in Shared Minds, a book about the new technologies of collaboration. Despite the billions of bits that information hardware can process in a second, the only matter of consequence silicon produces are relationships.

Of course reputation and trust have been essential in all economies of the past, so what’s new? Only two things:

• With the decreased importance of productivity, relationships and their allies become the main economic event.
• Telecommunications and globalism are intensifying, increasing, and transforming the ordinary state of relationships into an excited state of hyperrelations–over long distances, all the time, all places, all ways. It’s not Kansas anymore; it’s Oz.