The new rules, the same laws of expansion, establish order first, then what?.  To make matters even more complex, there are to begin with, new rules for individuals, companies and nations on the subject of “building wealth”, maintaining it and keeping it.  The old foundations of success are gone, and they are gone almost entirely!  For all of human history the source of success has been controlling natural resources – land, gold, oil. Suddenly, the answer is no longer to focus on these things although they are a part of the formula today for success, they are vastly reduced in importance to the importance of “possessing unique and rarified knowledge”, as the key element in success, today. 

There are people now that for decades have been described as “Kings of the new “Knowledge – Economy”.  Bill Gates for instance, owns no land, no gold or oil, no industrial processes.  How does one use knowledge to build wealth?  How do societies have to be reorganized to generate a wealth enhancing knowledge environment?  How do they incubate the entrepreneurs necessary to bring about change on a grand scale to create massive new bastions of wealth to balance the old stagnant regimes against new growth and prosperity for new generations to come?  What skills are needed to do this?

It’s a whole new ball game and has been for over two and a half decades!  The knowledge based economy is racing along like the wind now and it is asking new questions, giving new answers and developing new roles for success in the world today. 

Rule #1:  “No one ever became rich by saving money.”  Rule #2.  Sometimes successful businesses have to cannibalize themselves to save themselves.”  Rule #3:  Two routes other than radical technological change can lead to high growth, high rate of return opportunities that others do not see or understand, sociological disequilibriums and developmental disequalibriums.  Rule #4:  Making capitalism work in a deflationary environment is much harder than making it work in an inflationary environment, unless one is innovating at such a rapid rate of speed that neither environment matters because one is creating their own environment which is more desirable to others than in comparing disequalibriums in either sociological change or developmental change or both.  Rule #5:  There are institutional substitutes for individual entrepreneurial change agents unless the entrepreneur is brilliant enough to “leap frog” the institutional world of the status quo.  Rule #6:  No society that values order above all else will be creative; but without some degree of order creativity disappears.  The first law of expansion is ORDER.  The second law of expansion is allowing creativity to fully prosper in an ordered environment, without chaos to interrupt the creative explorative process that is required to realize the greatest returns from the fueling of the imagination and the spirit, the two most powerful elements to generate change with, to profit from, ever known and that remain constants in the equation of generation of unlimited space, time, cash-flow and lifestyle.  Rule #7:  A successful knowledge based economy requires large public investments in education, infrastructures, and research and development.  Rule #8:  The biggest unknown for the individual in a knowledge based economy is how to have a career in a system where there are no careers!