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

Thanksgiving

I received a really nice email this week from the president of a group I work with. She was thanking me for working the greeting/nametag table at a their annual member event. Appreciated my tearing myself away from the party.

Got me thinking.

I run one of their biggest activities, with hundreds of volunteers. I tend to run it with a lead foot and a deaf ear.

It’s a good cause, and I’m continually grateful I can call for help and get it. Without the volunteers I have nothing.

So this was a chance to personally acknowledge and thank all the volunteers who came to the party. It was efficient, and possibly ostentatious, as they all saw me hustling to relieve the bottleneck.

I figure the rest of the year they respond to help me. This maybe balances our relationship.

Several years ago I started a company that fell short on income. I learned that without money, Thank You kept us moving in close formation until we fixed the problems. 

Since then I've come to believe that a primary responsibility of successful leadership is Thank You.

In a season of giving thanks, it’s warming to reflect on how much I can depend on my many buds.

What Is School For?

Here is a remarkable 17 minute video of Seth Godin, giving a TEDxYouth presentation at the Brooklyn Free School riffing about the purpose of school.

Some of Seth’s ideas that may be unfamiliar, but nothing doesn’t make sense, showing what happens when someone gets beyond the excuses that pass for thinking about education, focusing on a rigorous, energetic thought experiment.

A pure delight. 

Wading In The Streams

Google Plus streams (Posts) were a new technology. I’ve evolved some practices to make it easier to use and more valuable for me.

I already follow sixty blogs on Google Reader. I’m reading for my own development, but also forward a fair amount, say one out of three, to friends and customers who I know have an interest in a subject. You can see the blogs I subscribe to on the bottom of the right column on this blog, where they are titled Good Ideas. I blog on Sales Lab Posts and Through The Browser.

The Google Plus Profile stream is my outgoing stream that I send. The Google Plus Home stream is incoming from the Google Plus pages I follow and is not visible to others.You should see one on your Plus page.

Outbound

If I write something, I have three circles I send it to Team, Friends, and Acquaintances. That goes to their Plus streams. I have sent some posts to Team alone. Friends were originally humor contributors.

I also include Public for anyone who comes looking at my stream and as a record of anything I originate.

If I want a stream post to go to someone’s email (higher priority) I send it to an email not associated with their Plus page.

Inbound

When someone I’m following on Plus writes something that I really like, I follow a similar practice, first send to Public for a record in my stream for me, then usually to people who I know will be interested, either to their Plus page for their stream or to another email address. Maybe one time in a hundred I will send something written by someone else to my whole list.

A difference between reading Plus stream and Reader is that Plus stream posts come most recent first. Reader allows me to read by author, which is especially good when I am looking for a previous post. Plus is more entertaining, and less formal – many of the people I follow on Plus don’t have a blog. I follow blogs and news outlets on Reader.

Posting Practices

I develop an idea in a blog post, and then expand from my platform to other platforms.

If I want to extend someone else’s idea, that goes to a comment under their post.

If I want to disagree with someone, I let it sit for an hour. If I still want to disagree, I let it sit for a day. If I still want to disagree I let it sit forever. Disagreement usually comes back as a positive idea that merits a blog post.

If I like something and have nothing to add, I’ll + it or like it, whatever a platform will allow.

What are your practices?