99% represents the number of smartest people who DON’T work for you.

Yes, the people who don’t work for your brand!

Let me explain….

Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems framed the principle that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”. As a result, this principle was called Joy’s Law.

For any marketer, this should come as no surprise: most of us can agree that we are ignorant about almost everything. I have not got a clue how my washing machine really works and I’m still don’t really know how diesel engines work. But getting used to the fact that most of us are ignorant about almost everything is hard to take.

The implications of Bill Joy’s principle are profound, especially as Joy was not talking about the old “war for talent” trope. Joy knew that even if you get the best and the brightest to work for you, there will always be an infinite number of other, smarter people employed by others.

Google’s Verily division even boast about it..

What Bill Joy was referring to is a singular definition of smart as “referring to capability but not willingness to work for someone’.

Bill Joy was arguing for tapping networks of smart non-employees for innovation and problem-solving horsepower. As he explained “it’s better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals”.

But there are a few challenges with this provocative thinking…..

1. The reason most companies were created in the first place was to put people in an office or factory, and give them tasks, roles and responsibilities. In turn, this meant finding and hiring people, and using experience and credentials as qualifiers. However, everything and everybody were under one roof and you had to turn up every day. The ongoing arguments about turning up in the office everyday versus remote working are a legacy of this thinking.
2. The second challenge is this: no manager or recruiter can really admit she or he can’t hire the smartest and best people in the world. But that is patently not true: think about it — every technology company in the world is in a race to get the best talent, and they can afford to pay higher wages than most other businesses.
3. And there is the third challenge: often most of the world’s ‘smartest’ people don’t have the right credentials and are not even in the right country or did not go to the right university. They’re not available, they might already have a job. As a result, it is a challenge for any business is to find ways to access that knowledge.

Embracing this new reality means creating a new frame of reference.

Having a ‘walled garden’ approach is a mindset of the past, not 2019. The view that ‘we can do this ourselves with our own resources’ is based on fantasy, not fact.

What do Amazon, Airbnb, Spotify and Netflix have in common?

They are all considered “Exponential Organisations”.

Whatever your misgivings about some of these companies — and there are plenty we should have — what we should all do is try to understand what is really going on.

An Exponential Organisation is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large compared to it’s peers because of the use of new organisational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies. Basically, they make do with considerably fewer resources using these technologies.

As Salim Ismail describes it in Exponential Organisations, most business today are ‘built for a linear world: hierarchical, centralised, top down and focusing on ownership due to scarcity of people, resources, assets and platforms’. They evolved for an era of economies of scale and relative stability.

Ismail also points out five external characteristics that define an Exponential Organisation, for which we use the acronym SCALE:

1. Staff on Demand
2. Community & Crowd
3. Algorithms
4. Leveraged
5. Assets
6. Engagement.

At least two of these external characteristics are driven by people who DON’T work for your organisation.

Example: Lego

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are two examples of what is defined as ‘distributed problem solving’ — and they are growing exponentially: they are no longer just for scrappy startups or cash-poor, idea-rich entrepreneurs.

Lego tapped into the 99%

Large brands such as Lego used Indiegogo to create LEGO FORMA, a build-it-yourself mechanical model to create a premium product for adults. Lego used crowdfunding to test a new concept and quickly determine directly from consumers themselves whether those ideas are worth pursuing, without going through the normal research-test-launch phase that marketers are used to.

And it is not just for product development or research. Online expertise marketplaces such as Kaggle and Innocentive for enable brands to put their unsolved problems, for example a data science problem, out to the crowd to address.

Marketers are on the Frontline

As marketers, we are on the frontline of this ‘expertise being outside the organisation’ challenge. We are used to having a network of agencies and experts to advise us. We don’t believe (in most cases!) that we are the experts on copywriting or creating television advertisements. The implications of this notion are pretty profound:

• Marketing is the part of the business that already knows how to harness world-class external expertise without having to have that talent permanently on payroll
• Marketers believe in tapping the power of people outside the organisation is the way to accomplish things
• Marketers are already quite open to the idea of having teams working on your problem instead of hiring one person
• Marketers know how to create collaborations and processes that are open to the smart contributions of people outside our corporate firewalls
• Marketers are used to setting deadlines that incentivise creative breakthroughs much more quickly.

You can argue that many of these implications do not apply to our colleagues in HR, Finance, IT Operations and so on. If you have ever had to explain why you need to hire an agency to a non-marketer, you will understand!

Given that marketing teams are on the frontline of understanding how to create a network of great contributors, perhaps marketing can rise up to the challenge of harnessing Joy’s Law for our brand and company’s benefit.

Three things you need to understand about the 99% rule

Here are three suggestions to get everybody to understand the opportunity that comes with knowing that not everything can be done within your four walls:

1. Explain how marketing has — as part of its DNA — the role of actively seeking ideas, insights and inspiration from wherever they may reside, rather than just inside the organisation
2. Study how innovation ecosystems have been created in certain environments and see can you tap into them. For example, Shenzhen, China is now the go-to city for businesses building robots, drones, smart sensors, and wearable technology, with hundreds of factories capable of turning product batches from prototypes in a few days.
3. Actively look for opportunities to test how you could build in co-creation with users, suppliers using crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

Resources

If you want to know more about reframing your thinking about the 99%, read, listen and research the following:

1. “Abundance” — a book by Peter Diamandis:
2. Peter Diamandis and Dan Sullivan podcast ‘Exponential Wisdom’ http://podcast.diamandis.com/
3. Understand the 6 Ds of Digital Disruption: https://singularityhub.com/2016/11/22/the-6-ds-of-tech-disruption-a-guide-to-the-digital-economy/
4. “Exponential Organisations — Why New Organisations Are Ten Times Better, Faster and Cheaper than Yours- a book by Salim Ismail, Michael Malone and Yuri Van Geest. I had Yuri Van Geest speak at DMX Dublin, the conference I programme in 2015 — and he was sensational.
5. “Exponential Transformations” — a book by by Francisco Palao, Michelle Lapierre and Salim Ismail
6. “Sprint” — a book by Jake Knapp — lots of insight and tools here: https://www.thesprintbook.com/. I have done a TONNE of Sprints using this methodology — and I can highly recommend it.

This is an extended version of my original Marketing Week column.