Chapter 2 Productivity Reshaped: From Labor to Leverage

In Chapter 1, we witnessed the "awakening" of Chief Intelligence Officer Cheng Yuan. The shock he encountered was not a crisis of his personal career, but an omen that the productivity paradigm of an era was about to be overturned. Once, the engine of corporate growth was "more people" and "longer time," but this engine is stalling due to its own complexity. The bottleneck has shifted from time to attention, forcing us to re-examine a core concept in the business world that is both ancient and eternal: Leverage.

Leverage is a metaphor borrowed from physics into the business world, meaning using a certain tool or system to pry huge output with minimal input. Understanding the iterative history of leverage is a prerequisite for understanding how AI becomes the ultimate "Meta-Leverage." Because the emergence of every new leverage is not only an improvement in efficiency but also a transfer of power and a redistribution of wealth. What we are about to see is a history of liberation from relying on others' permission to achieving complete autonomy.