Designer Paul Taylor contends that working on what you’re working on, you’ll get a lot more done than only working with your own smart people:

Joy’s law is the principle that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Bill Joy, the computer engineer to whom it’s attributed argued that if you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers’ needs.

Joy was not talking about the hackneyed “war for talent” trope. Even if you somehow manage to get the best and the brightest to work for you, there will always be an infinite number of other, smarter people employed by others.

Wikipedia notes,

The law highlights an essential problem that is faced by many modern businesses, “that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge [is] to find ways to access that knowledge.”

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