An Interview with David Korten, Author of When Corporations Rule the World

Korten: Um, well, yeah. It’s much more clear in "The Great Turning", but yes, absolutely.  Um…

Kall: I mixed them up. 

Korten: Yeah.

Kall: The two of them.  "The Great Turning" is kind of an embellishment and a fleshing out of a lot of the ideas that you had, I think, in the post-corporate world. 

Korten: That’s true, yeah.  It’s putting the whole sort of corporate issues into a much clearer and larger framework, but yeah. 

Kall: You know, I discovered, um…I’ve known about your work for years.  And I kind of rediscovered it.  I’ve started working on a book with the working title, “Bottom Up.” 

Korten: Hmmm-hmmm. Excellent.

Kall:  And it kind of came to me because I read Paul Hawkins’ book Blessed Unrest and I had some conversations with Joe Trippi about how bottom-up internet technology changed the nature of politics for all time to come. 

Korten: Hmmmmm.

Kall:  And it works out that there are a decent number of books in the business and the internet world that talk about bottom-up kinds of concepts.  One of the newest ones that just came out is Crowd-Sourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howell.  Or Clay Shirkey’s book, Here Comes Everyone.  Then there’s The Long Tail and The Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki.  There’s a lot of them that are out there on the internet business side of things, but you and Riane Eisler are one of the few that have actually written about this from a cultural point of view. 

Korten: Hmmmmm-hmmm.

Kall: I think. And a…

Korten: Well, on one, of the folks you’re talking about from the business world, I assume what they’re trying to do is figure out how to control those phenomena or to profit from them to maintain their Empire businesses.

Kall:  Ah….That’s interesting.

Korten:  I mean, I don’t know; I haven’t read the ones you mentioned, so I may be wrong.

Kall:  Ah, they’re looking at the phenomenon, seeing how it’s playing out on the internet.  Ah, last week I went to my first internet business conference.  Web 2.0 Expo.  Do you know about Web 2.0?

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