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The Misfit Economy by Alexa Clay & Kyra Maya Phillips
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The Misfit Economy

Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs

$17.84

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Narrator Emily Woo Zeller

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Length 6 hours 4 minutes
Language English
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Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. The usual suspects.

This book isn't about them. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they're not in Silicon Valley. They're in the street markets of Sao Paulo and Guangzhou, and the rubbish dumps of Lagos. They are pirates, slum dwellers, computer hackers, dissidents, and inner city gang members.

Across the globe, diverse innovators operating in the black, grey, and informal economies are developing solutions to a myriad of challenges. Far from being "deviant entrepreneurs" that pose threats to our social and economic stability, these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and practices that we can learn from and apply to move formal markets.

This book asks: Who are these unknown visionaries? How do they work? How do they organize themselves? How do they catalyze innovation? And ultimately, how can you take these lessons into your own world?

Alexa Clay is a storyteller and leading expert on subculture. She is cofounder of the League of Intrapreneurs, a movement to create change from within big business, and the founder of Wisdom Hackers, an incubator for philosophical inquiry. She is a graduate of Brown University and Oxford University.

Kyra Maya Phillips is a writer and innovation strategist. She is a director of The Point People, a network-based consultancy focused on innovation and systemic change. She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, but is now based in London, where she lives with her husband and son. She is a graduate of The London School of Economics.

Emily Woo Zeller began her voice-over career by voicing animation in Asia. She returned to the United States in 2009 and found a natural fit as an audiobook narrator. Described by AudioFile magazine as doing "an extraordinary job of varying the voices in the dialogue without losing the intimacy of the story," Emily's multilingual, multicultural framework brings a particularly unique, clear-eyed, and intimate perspective into Asian American narratives. While she specializes in Asian American narratives, Emily's work spans a broad spectrum, including young adult fiction and such titles as The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore and The Sex Diaries Project by Arianne Cohen. She also narrated Gulp by Mary Roach, for which she won an AudioFile Earphones Award.

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Reviews

"This book will make you think again with engaging stories and insightful analysis of how people operating on the fringes create unique business models, and in the process transform the culture around them." ---Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human Expand reviews
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale