The Business of the 21st Century

Robert T. Kiyosaki, the bestselling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad (1997), writes this book as part of his Rich Dad series to advocate for network marketing, a business model in which independent representatives earn income by selling products through personal word-of-mouth and recruiting others to do the same. Drawing on his background as a Marine helicopter pilot in Vietnam, a former Xerox salesperson, and a self-made multimillionaire who retired at 47, Kiyosaki argues that traditional employment is obsolete and that network marketing offers ordinary people the best vehicle for achieving financial freedom. Co-authored with John Fleming, a veteran network marketing executive and publisher of Direct Selling News, the book also features a chapter by Kiyosaki's wife, Kim Kiyosaki. Structured in three parts, it moves from diagnosing problems with conventional financial thinking to presenting network marketing as the solution to outlining what it takes to succeed. Throughout, Kiyosaki draws on his familiar framework of the "rich dad" (his best friend's father, an eighth-grade dropout who became one of the richest men in Hawaii) and the "poor dad" (his biological father, a well-educated government employee who died with little wealth), contrasting their approaches to money.

Part One opens against the backdrop of the late-2000s financial crisis. Kiyosaki catalogs the damage: mass layoffs, 10.2 percent unemployment, crashed real estate values, and decimated retirement portfolios. He argues that the crisis only exposed a vulnerability that always existed, since most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, trading time for money with no safety net. He traces the roots of this fragility to the United States abandoning the gold standard in 1971, which enabled unchecked money printing and credit expansion that inflated a middle class built on devalued dollars and leveraged real estate, a bubble that burst by 2007. Kiyosaki contends that job security, company pensions, Social Security, and Medicare are Industrial-Age relics. He notes that the concept of retirement pensions originated with Otto von Bismarck in 1889, when life expectancy was roughly 45, and that the Prussian education system was designed to produce obedient workers rather than independent thinkers. The economy, he insists, is not the real issue; the individual is. Yet he also frames tough economic times as fertile ground for entrepreneurship, pointing out that Microsoft, Disney, and more than half the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average launched during recessions.

To explain why the type of income matters more than its quantity, Kiyosaki introduces the CASHFLOW Quadrant, a framework from his earlier book Cashflow Quadrant. The quadrant divides income earners into four categories: E (Employee), who values security; S (Self-employed or Small-business owner), who values independence but remains trapped trading time for money; B (Business owner of a large enterprise with 500 or more employees), whose business works for them; and I (Investor), whose money works for them. The left side (E and S) is where most people live, trained by culture and schooling to seek safe jobs. The right side (B and I) is where financial freedom resides. Kiyosaki argues that simply changing jobs within the same quadrant changes nothing; the fundamental shift must be from E or S to B and I. Each quadrant reflects a different mindset, and moving between them requires a change in identity and thinking, not just activity.

Kiyosaki stresses the entrepreneurial mindset as a prerequisite. He contrasts a talented hairstylist who has talked for years about opening a salon but never acted with a former flight attendant who retrained as a hairstylist and opened a successful salon. The difference, he argues, is courage and self-determination. To illustrate the stakes, Kiyosaki recounts how he and Kim were homeless in 1985, living in their car, but chose to pursue financial freedom rather than take secure jobs. By 1989 they were millionaires. He then identifies the barriers to entering the B quadrant through traditional means: Starting a business costs an average of $5 million, carries a 90 percent failure rate in its first five years, and often requires years without a paycheck. Franchises reduce risk but demand significant capital and still frequently fail. With these options exhausted, Kiyosaki reveals that he and Donald Trump, in their book We Want You to Be Rich, identified network marketing as the model that best creates ongoing income with low startup costs, low overhead, and flexible part-time operation.

Part Two presents eight assets that Kiyosaki argues network marketing simultaneously builds. He first discloses that he is not currently a network marketing distributor or company owner and holds no financial interest in any company, though he temporarily joined several companies to research them from the inside. He first encountered the model in 1975 and dismissed it, but his views changed over two decades of research. Through dialogue with Fleming, the book explains the model's mechanics: Companies pay independent representatives to share products through personal networks, and representatives earn bonuses not only on their own sales but on the sales of people they recruit, creating leverage. The industry generates over $110 billion in annual global sales, and figures such as Warren Buffett and Richard Branson have owned network marketing companies.

The eight assets are: (1) a real-world business education that teaches financial literacy, goal-setting, communication, and money management through experience rather than theory; (2) personal development, which Kiyosaki frames as a necessity, arguing that building wealth requires changing who you are at a core level; (3) a community of like-minded friends who share wealth-building values, since a person's income tends to approximate the average of their five closest friends; (4) the power of owning a network, illustrated by Thomas Edison, who became rich not by perfecting the light bulb but by creating the electrical distribution network that became General Electric; (5) a duplicable, fully scalable business where success depends on designing a process anyone can copy rather than on individual sales talent; (6) leadership skills, which Kiyosaki calls the force that makes all other business skills cohere, noting that because network marketing participants are voluntary and cannot be hired or fired, the operation runs on leadership rather than authority; (7) a mechanism for genuine wealth creation, built on a four-step plan of building a business, reinvesting in it, using surplus income to invest in real estate for cash flow, and letting accumulated assets buy luxuries; and (8) the capacity to dream big and keep dreaming bigger.

In a chapter by Kim Kiyosaki, the book argues that network marketing is especially powerful for women. She notes that approximately 88 percent of the 15 million U.S. network marketing participants are women and cites statistics about women's financial vulnerability, including that 47 percent of women over 50 are single and that three out of four elderly people living in poverty are women. She presents network marketing as a path free of glass ceilings or income limits.

Part Three addresses practical matters. Kiyosaki advises choosing a network marketing company based on the quality of its training programs, the caliber of its leadership, and whether the product generates genuine word-of-mouth enthusiasm rather than on compensation plans alone. He recommends committing to a five-year plan, citing Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule from Outliers to reinforce the general principle that mastery takes sustained effort. He emphasizes the need to unlearn E and S quadrant habits such as fixed work hours, management hierarchies, and traditional sales techniques. The book closes by defining financial intelligence as knowing how to earn, protect, budget, and leverage money, and arguing that network marketing's purpose extends beyond income to developing the capacity for genuine wealth. Kiyosaki describes three ways of living: in fear, in frustration, and in joy and contentment. He positions network marketing as a democratic model in which the only way to become rich is by helping others do the same, comparing its democratizing potential to Henry Ford's mission to make the automobile affordable to the general public. Drawing on his experience as a combat pilot, he connects the spread of economic opportunity to the broader cause of global peace.