A bold and vital book that asks and answers the most urgent question of today: What Would Google Do?

In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google?the fastest-growing company in history?to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything?from corporations to governments, nations to individuals?must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book's central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It's about you.

Jeff Jarvis is the proprietor of one of the web's most popular and respected blogs about media, Buzzmachine.com. He heads the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York. He was named one of a hundred worldwide media leaders by the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2007?11 and was the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine. He is the author of the forthcoming book Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live.

An indispensable manual for survival and success that asks the most important question today's leaders, in any industry, can ask themselves: What would Google do?To demonstrate how to emulate Google, Jarvis lays out his laws of what he calls "the new Google century," including such insights as:Think DistributedBecome a PlatformJoin the Post-Scarcity, Open-Source, Gift EconomyThe Middleman Has DiedYour Worst Customers Are Your Best Friends and Your Best Customers Are Your PartnersDo What You Do Best and Link to the RestGet Out of the WayMake Mistakes Well... and MoreHe applies these principles not just to emerging technologies and the Internet, but to other industries--telecommunications, airlines, television, government, healthcare, education, journalism, and yes, book publishing--showing ultimately what the world would look like if Google ran it. The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that will change the way readers ask questions and solve problems.