Industrial to Zero is the second book in the trilogy that began with Open World, Closed Doors.

Industrial to Zero

Work, Care, and the End of the Distant Organisation

Machines are getting cheaper. Humans are getting more valuable. The organisation built to keep them apart is breaking.

In Industrial to Zero, Dr Reg Butterfield argues that the labour market has quietly outrun the map we still use to read it. Women now outnumber men in the workforce for the first time in a generation, not because of a recession but because the growing work is high-touch, relational, and place-bound, which is the work society labelled women's work and underpaid. At the same time, artificial intelligence is compressing the routine work that the industrial hierarchy was built to manage, leaving the human premium as the scarce and appreciating asset of the economy.

The book names the disease that kills the old model as distance, the bureaucracy, delay, and diffused responsibility that push every organisation away from the people it serves, and it examines the cure through the pioneers who have dismantled the hierarchy, from Haier and Buurtzorg to Wigan, Kerala, and the Swiss cantons. It weighs the evidence on working from home, flexibility, and legislation without partisan spin, and it shows why the state cannot administer a future it does not embody.

Most books about change promise addition. This one promises the necessary subtraction of the twentieth century, stripping the accumulated distance until the organisation reaches zero, and the customer, the citizen, and the worker finally hold the say.