New Rule No. 2: Advocate, Don't Alienate The old rules taught you to ask, "What is my product or service, and how can I sell it to you?" With that question, adversarialism was baked into the DNA of the buyer-seller transaction.

The new rules ask, "Who are you? What do you need? How can I help?" This creates a dynamic of advocacy and mutual accountability. The more trust you build, the more value you release, and the more wealth you create.

These new principles are essential in I-space, but old attitudes die hard. Enterprises trying to operate in I-space -- such as Facebook, Apple, eBay, or MySpace -- have each felt the sting of big blunders that violated this new rule. But President Barack Obama gets it. In his proposed overhaul of financial regulations, brokers will be compelled to put their clients' interests first. Trained in the administrative point of view, Wall Street executives are already preparing to fight the very changes that would put them on a path to new wealth creation.

New Rule No. 3: Collaborate and Federate to Compete When you're in I-Space, you need to collaborate and federate to provide the support individuals need. You can't do it alone because the needs of individuals don't conform to existing organizational and industry boundaries. This means learning how to manage what you don't control or own. These economies of trust are becoming even more important than economies of scale.

The emphasis shifts from contracts and legal sanctions to trust and transparency as companies work together, aligned with their customers' interests -- sharing core values, business practices, infrastructure, and systems. Amazon's marketplace and eBay's webs of buyers and sellers are early prototypes of these federated networks. Apple and Facebook are struggling to understand the rules of engagement that should govern relationships with their applications developers. You can see them climbing a new learning curve through trial and error as they figure out how to build and sustain economies of trust.

Are You Ready to Let Go? After decades of working with adults on the challenges of transition, I know that letting go of the old rules won't be easy. No one gives up what they know without a fight. We like to think that a big shake-up like this economic crisis will unstick us, but typically crisis makes us crawl deeper into our hole and decisively assume the fetal position. Breaking free of the gravitational pull of the familiar requires the equivalent of an asteroid collision.

Letting go is a Catch-22. You don't want to let go until you have something new to cling to, but you can't discover the new thing until you let go. In between, you must cross a mystery zone. Eventually you get to the point where you can't stand the feeling of things not adding up for one more minute. That's when you take a leap of faith, and the questions start to feel more important than the answers. You're in a new place. The bad news: There are no maps. The good news? You are the mapmaker.

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