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control. The factory needs labor, sure, but labor really needs the factory. It was always

easier for management to replace labor than it was for labor to find a new factory.

Today, the means of production = a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three

thousand dollars buys a worker an entire factory.

This change is a fundamental shift in power and control. When you can master the

communication, conceptual, and connectivity elements of the new work, then you have

more power than management does. And if management attracts, motivates, and retains

great talent, then it has more leverage than the competition.

It starts with bloggers, musicians, writers and others who don't need anyone's support or

permission to do their thing. So a blogger named Brian Clark makes a fortune launching a

wonderful new theme for Wordpress. And Perez Hilton becomes rich and famous writing

on his blog. Abbey Ryan makes almost a hundred thousand dollars a year painting a tiny

oil painting each day and selling it on eBay. These individuals have all the technical,

manufacturing, and distribution support they need, so they are both capitalists and

workers.

The organizations they work for have a very low PERL. In fact, for solely owned

organizations, there aren't any easily replaced laborers.

This idea is spreading, faster than most of us realize. Now, the thriving organization

consists of well-organized linchpins doing their thing in concert, creating more value than

any factory ever could. Instead of trying to build organizations filled with human

automatons, we've realized we must go the other way.

Mediocrity and the Web

Hugh MacLeod: "The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder

to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest."

The Internet has raised the bar because it's so easy for word to spread about great stuff.

There's more junk than ever before, more lousy writing, more pointless products. But this

abundance of trash is overwhelmed by the market's ability to distribute news about the

great stuff.

Of course, mediocrity isn't going to go away. Yesterday's remarkable is today's really

good and tomorrow's mediocre.

Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.

The Hierarchy of Value

There are always more people at the bottom of the stairs, doing hard work that's easy to

learn. As you travel up the hierarchy, the work gets easier, the pay gets better, and the

number of people available to do the work gets smaller.

Lots of people can lift. That's not paying off anymore. A few people can sell. Almost no

one puts in the work to create or invent. Up to you.

(How the Average Subsidize the Merely Mediocre--and the Above Average Get

Screwed)

Let's say you're the boss, the guy with the map, the person generating jobs and taking

profits. You have a business model that allows you to hire people to manipulate data or

make sales or do some other task that you can write down in a manual.

An exceptional performer earns you $30 for every hour he works. A good employee is

worth $25 an hour, and a mediocre worker can contribute about $20 an hour in profit.

If you can't tell who's mediocre and who's exceptional when you do the hiring, and you

want to pay everyone a standard rate, how much should you pay?

Well, other than "as little as possible," the answer is certainly less than $25 an hour.

Probably less than $20 an hour. You want every employee to make money, even the

mediocre ones.

Which means that all your other employees are getting paid less to make up for the ones

who contribute the least. The exceptional performers are getting paid a lot less, which is

why they should (and will) leave. Exceptional performers are starting to realize that it

doesn't pay to do factory work at factory wages only to subsidize the boss.

Remarkable People

In Purple Cow, I made a simple argument:

Corporations have no right to our attention. For years (or decades),