Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose

Prologue: A Whole New World

"The future is disorder. A door like this has opened up only five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."—Valentine in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia

This book reaches the public eye in the dawn of a new era in human history. Perhaps more so than any previous era that inspired historians to give it a name signifying its import, looking back hundreds of years—thousands of years, say some ^[1]—this new era may be unmatched in the scale of its effect on humankind. Numerous credible authors have testified in their writings that something this big is happening. Francis Fukuyama declared the end of a major cultural era in his ...