No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.
Joy's law is an argument for openness rather than a lament. It is why hiring cannot be the whole strategy and why open-source and external research collaboration exist.
In practice
- A firm with the best internal research group still learns more from a conference than from its own labs.
- A council with a strong policy team gets its best idea from another council's failed pilot.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life