Capitalism Without Capital

This talk is an introduction to John Kay’s recent book “The Corporation in the twenty-first century”.In the industrial revolution, businesses were defined by their tangible capital. the iron works and the textile mills in which the routine assembly process was operated by minimally skilled workers. Modern business is no longer like this. Tangible capital is bought as a service from specialist suppliers who have neither interest or ability to control the business. The corporation is a collection of the capabilities of teams of people, and the workers, not the plant, are the means of production.Speaker:Sir John Kay is one of Britain’s leading economists with wide practical experience in business and finance. A Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Society of Edinburgh, he was the founding dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and held a chair at London Business School. He is a winner of the Senior Wincott Award for Financial Journalism for his Financial Times columns. Other People’s Money won the Saltire Prize for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His other books include Obliquity, The Long and Short of It, Greed is Dead (written with Paul Collier) and Radical Uncertainty (with Mervyn King).