Karaoke Capitalism of Ridderstrale and Nordstrom, can be considered as a great inspiration for business leaders and managers. Although both authors have PhDs in International Business and although this book is full of references to academic literature, Karaoke Capitalism is not a long academic treatise about business. Au contraire. Where many publications intend to tell the reader what to think, this book has the intention to invite people to think for themselves, as individuals.

What the authors claim is that we live in the age of the individual and organizations in individualized societies should finally learn to pay attention to all of these unique individuals. In the old days people listened to churches to know what to do. Then the state became the authority. Now the only authority one has is one’s self. Institutions have crumbled or are in the process of crumbling and individuals have to make choices themselves. Although this freedom of choice has given us independence, we are now confronted with individual accountability. Besides this change in institutions, there also have been massive technological changes. First of all mankind has never before had so much opportunities to express oneself thanks to the advances in technology. Second of all the authors point to the explosion of information, which has made it more difficult to arrive at valuable knowledge. A third change the authors describe is the change in values. Religion, politics and other institutions used to give meaning to our lives, but today many people complain that everything has become more superficial and shallow. The authors call this the ‘meaning of lite.’ Ridderstrale and Nordstrom do not suggest that individuals are now isolated human beings deprived of any social connection. They just point to the fact that social connections have changed and are based more on values and interests than on tradition and what Durkheim has called ‘mechanical solidarity’; we are dealing with new ‘tribes.’

The freedom of choice, the opportunities for expression and the search for meaning have caused a growing need for organisations to focus on individuals and their wishes. There is a growing acceptance of the fact that human beings are not rational beings and that emotions and other non-rational issues are important. These issues can also be noticed in literature on the experience economy, emotion economy, dream society, attention economy, hedonic psychology etc. One of the issues the authors focus on is trust. Trust becomes crucial in a world in which networking and collaborating becomes ever more important for success.
Trust and knowing and understanding each other are also connected since people have the opportunity to learn more about organisations and organisations have to learn more about the people who they want as their customers. The relation between lack of knowledge and lack of trust can for example be seen in the ever diminishing trust people have in organisations which are ‘faceless’ nowadays. Another issue is complexity and diversity. A world that is changing at an incredible pace and that consists of many (temporary) networks, cannot be dealt with using standards and rules alone. This also counts for the people working in organisations. A complex and changing world needs teams of people that reflect this dynamic nature and complexity.

As the Dutch philosopher Cornelis has said: we are shifting from the well-known social ruling system we live in, towards a new logic, the logic of communicative self-steering, in which individuals choose and decide. The ten commandments the authors give for ‘Karaoke Leadership’ at the end of the book should be very inspiring to everyone wanting to make this shift. Many of the ideas presented in this book reminded me of Schumacher’s classic ‘Small is Beautiful – Economics as if people mattered,’ but including many contemporary examples which makes it very current. If the need to understand the perspective of the authors was already big in 1973, the year Schumacher’s book was published, one can only imagine how big it is today. Anna (JMC) Snel