General introduction

The ways of doing business as we knew them for the last decades have proved wrong. This might seem a bold opening statement for a book by a business publisher. It is however the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the deep crisis of our financial systems that has been experienced in the last few months. This is not just an economic crisis: it is an ideological crisis, and a spiritual one. Just as communism and its utopian theories proved wrong, so did capitalism in its deregulated form. As much as we might pretend to lead the same old lives as we did before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we are not doing so. We are already in the first hours of a new dawn, just as Soviet citizens were during the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in the months prior to the end of their state. Without any sort of moralism, capitalism for capitalism’s sake just did not work for the rest of us. While corporate tycoons hold on to their privileges and governments desperately try to reboot the system as it was, it is time to think about the future. It will have to be a different future.