Raj Patel – The Value of Nothing!

I have just come across Raj Patel – and his book ‘The Value of Nothing’ which was on The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010.

Raj Patel grew up in north-west London where his family ran a corner shop. Patel received a B.A in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, and a Masters Degree from the London School of Economics, and gained his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2002. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. As part of his academic training, Patel worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization and the United Nations. He has since become an outspoken public critic of all of these organizations and it seems that people either love him or hate him – he has been named as “the antichrist’ by some whilst a New Age group is claiming him as the next Christ! Whether your love him or hate him – his message seems to be completely aligned with the spirit of BNI – namely that sharing and taking an interest in others is the way forwards for business and the way forwards for humanity.  Here is a short video of Raj Patel talking about his new book: