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