If we raise our periscopes for a 360-degree look around, we see that the pyramids and hierarchies of years past are rapidly being replaced with networks and uncentralized systems.

In these systems, larger numbers of people than ever take initiative, make policy, collaborate to point their organizations' ways forward, and work together to release human ingenuity and maximize human choice. These people's actions are not, for the most part, the result of being told what to do. They are the consequence, not of command and control, but of consultation, of relationships that are intermixed, interwoven, and interactive.

This is the state of affairs that led me to describe the most advanced form of human organization as a nobody-in-charge system. That phrase, which became a book title, was not wholly tongue-in-cheek; it was a way of describing the style of leadership that was already a strong trend as we moved into the twenty-first century.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this trend was driven by the sudden convergence of ever faster, more retentive computers with rapidly spreading, increasingly wider-band telecommunications – a dynamic complexity that gets more dynamic and more complex with each passing year.

It is clear by now, as only a few futurists were forecasting in the 1970s, that information is the world's dominant resource, taking the role that has been played successively in history by such physical resources as labor, stone, bronze, minerals, metals, and energy.