Adrian Wooldridge on Al-Qaeda as a Virtual Corporation

Adrian Wooldridge at The Fifth Annual Spring Symposium at the McIntire School of Commerce said:

... I remember in the 1990s reading endlessly books by people like Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos, about the virtual corporation and the -- corporation, and delayering, and hierarchy, and the importance of networks, and people like Jack Wells, who pay lots of lip service to it. But where that organization has actually materialized is not in, you know, Harvard-educated people running businesses. It's al Qaeda that is the perfect virtual organization. It's an institutional innovation of incredible power. And I think that's one reason why we're not underestimating the importance of terrorism. We're not underestimating the importance of terrorism because the capacity of these people to inflict massive harm is greater than it's ever been, through not just nuclear weapons, but biological weapons, chemical weapons. They just have a capacity to inflict damage on people and on economic systems by the panic it creates. Because the conditions for the spread of this ideology have never been greater, with this massive process of urbanization, with the fact that there are so many young people, young males, as Robert was saying earlier, in poorer parts of the world. And because of the power of global capitalism summons up resentment from people. And that resentment sort of organizes very disparate groups into what looks like a common organization.

Dr. Adrian Wooldridge's biography indicates that he is the Washington correspondent for The Economist.