“The smartest people work for someone else”

Here’s some extracts from an article by Forbes’ Rich Karlgaard:

” ‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.’

Say again? What organizational leader will admit he can’t hire the smartest people in the world? This provocative statement was first made by Sun Microsystems’ Bill Joy in 1990… It’s better, Joy said, to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers’ needs.

What Joy said in 1990 is unimaginably truer and more powerful in 2007… Your job, as a leader of an organization, is to tap into this mass of innovators, investors and consumers. Your job is to enlist as many smart people as you can to pull your company in the direction you want it to go. Your job is to learn and adapt as fast as the digital networks will let you. Can you?… It is not the wisdom of crowds. It is finding one smart person on the outside. If collective wisdom is what you want, Joy’s Law covers that, too.”

Interesting stuff.