This is by far the best book to explain democratic employee ownership to business people and to the owners of family firms who might be considering a sale to the employees. David Erdal has "walked the walk" by arranging for the successful sale of his large family business to the employees so he speaks with a convincing authority on the matter. He masterfully spells out the arguments on economic, managerial, political, and social psychological grounds for democratic worker ownership. This combination of real world experience and interdisciplinary understanding of the issues makes this the book on democratic employee ownership.

This is a significant piece of work and I expect it to play an important part in creating a different ownership landscape in the years to come.

Already looks like being one of the most influential business books of the year

BEYOND THE CORPORATION gives a breathtaking overview of employee ownership over the years and across the continents and provides a passionate argument of the case for employee ownership. It should be compulsory reading, not just for those of us on the inside, but for any student of economics, sociology, business or politics.

Erdal convincingly exposes the gross errors in the conventional models economists use to describe people and businesses (which he labels 'just-so stories'), and describes how and why employee-owned businesses are superior to publicly listed companies in every way. The book is an easy read, jam-packed with quotable passages.

Along the way, Zuckerberg has turned down acquisition offers of as much as $15 billion; worked with and against technology giants Google, Microsoft and Viacom; and knocked heads with privacy advocates. Those are some of the gems in the illuminating new book

Understanding Facebook's success is crucial to understanding the modern internet, and this is the definitive account of its rise and rise. Kirkpatrick's story is an important contribution to the biography of the digital age, and one of the most startling stories of human ingenuity and appetite you'll find on any shelf

Fascinating ... exciting ... The book is packed with interviews from all the key players, including Zuckerberg and Moskovitz. Kirkpatrick's subjects open up about everything

This fast paced narrative captures the excitement of the startup world and reminds me of the early days of Wikipedia when I realized we were onto something big. A big revelation is how Mark Zuckerberg's idealism led him to focus on product improvements rather than short-term revenue gains, and how critical this was to the company's success

Facebook is becoming the dominant social networking tool, facilitating our online and offline worlds. The Facebook Effect effectively shows its rapid evolution, where it is going, and how it will increasingly affect our lives

Mr. Kirkpatrick doesn't coddle his subject, yet he presents Mr. Zuckerberg's point of view much more comprehensibly than we have seen it before ... The author lets you get inside Mr. Zuckerberg's head

Mr. Kirkpatrick ... was encouraged by Mr. Zuckerberg to write this book and was granted extensive access to him and his associates ... [Kirkpatrick] gives the reader a detailed understanding ... [and] still does an animated job of evoking the collegiate atmosphere that reigned at the company

A carefully reported book that should change the way you think about a very unusual enterprise ... does the best job yet of making sense of Facebook's founder, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg

Kirkpatrick's amazing reporting details what happens when a hacker culture turns into a multi-billion-dollar firm. Mark Zuckerberg sought to maintain that hacker energy, and it's fascinating to hear what resulted

Engrossing. . . . A detailed and scrupulously fair history of [Facebook]