Joy’s Law

(Bill) Joy’s Law, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

What if overcoming Joy’s Law is the new baseline for succeeding?

Chris Anderson’s Makers showcases how Joy’s Law has already changed the front end of our economy.

If you’ve convinced yourself you’re not affected, God bless. My experience is that every time I have been unusually successful, we get out where no man has gone before, and start looking for signals for how to keep the party going.

If you noticed 2009 and 2010 were snafu,

That 2011 and 2012 were fubar, and

You suspect 2013 may be bohica...(NSFW), read on.

Makers gives some excellent ideas and case studies about why the old ways of working and organizing have have run their course, become uncompetitive, and how some are being successful in a number of industries. Showing up is no longer an acceptable baseline. Winners are going to have to attract the people who are really passionate and creative, the top tier for whatever they need done.

Chris Anderson is the guy to write Makers. The first time I met him, he was defending copyright by day as editor in chief of Wired magazine, and pushing the limits of copyright and Joy’s Law by night running the open source project for radio controlled flying vehicles (includes drones).

Yes, he’s a reporter, but he’s also writing about what he has learned making, starting, running, investing, and guiding more than a dozen companies. During his decade at Wired, they grew spectacularly. Consider what’s been happening to the rest of print media during that time.

What Chris has seen, done, realized, and written is that we are in a new paradigm. Limits sinking formerly well run companies have to be overcome and are being overcome.

We’ve learned a lot with open source software. Development is faster and more efficient, less error-prone, costs are lower, and open source has revolutionized the space formerly served by enterprise software. Anderson’s message is that “atoms are the new bits,” that technology has advanced enough to give the same increases in efficiency, opening new markets, that has already happened in software.

Read the book. Find your own models for moving forward. Move forward.

As Werner used to say, “Joy is when you have a new possibility.”

Happy New Year!

Kick off the New Year Right at Talk Your Business - How to make more and better sales right away! Wednesday Jan 30, 11:45 - 1:00 at the Arlington Chamber Small Business Roundtable

Design For Your Real World

Let’s suppose you went to DickDavies.com and selected the third navigation link, Presentations.

Pretty cool, eh? Notice you went across two websites?

Let’s try that again. Go to Sales Lab Posts and then switch to Through The Browser.

It would be real easy to have a reader go between those blogs and never notice. We use that at Sales Lab Resources.

Members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) get branded email addresses, i.e., tom.edison@ieee.org, which is a handy way to get the word out. The very best forward thinking organizations are starting to use corporate email domains like IEEE, maybe yours does, too.

What if the people who use your email domain also had a spot to put their own tools? Perhaps could occasionally use your internet?

That solves the problem of, What do you get when you cross a mobster with a marketer? An offer you can’t understand.

Are you really trying to promote stock photos of people who don’t work for your organization and bafflegab from people who only talk among themselves?

Robert Collins, the savant who invented the drive-by demo, recently posted this. I figure that’ll get him users, readers, and new friends. I downloaded mine.

What might one of your people put on their own space that was linked to your brand?

A bake sale? A chess competition?

And then you’d probably be visited by some bakers, cake buyers, and chess aficionados.

But they aren’t our target markets! Target markets, profiles, hot prospects, and the chosen few are fictions we make up to try to impose order on a chaotic, sometimes frightening world.

I have it based on unimpeachable authority that bakers, cake buyers, and chess aficionados buy in exactly the same percentages as your low hanging fruits.

How do I know?

I counted.

What could you do to make your web fiction more useful to your real world? 


Kick off the New Year Right at Talk Your Business - How to make more and better sales right away! Wednesday Jan 30, 11:45 - 1:00 at the Arlington Chamber Small Business Roundtable