• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

able to make five or twenty or a thousand times what you paid in labor.

So, the goal is to hire as many obedient, competent workers, as cheaply as you possibly

can. If you can use your productivity advantage to earn five dollars in profit for every

dollar you pay in wages, you win. Do it with a million employees and you hit a home run.

The problem?

Someone else is getting better than you at hiring cheap and competent workers. They can

ship the work overseas, or buy more machines, or cut corners faster than you can.

The other problem?

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable,

and the human. Sure, you can always succeed for a while with the cheapest, but you earn

your place in the market with humanity and leadership. It's certainly possible for a

shopper to buy food more cheaply than they sell it at Trader Joe's. But Trader's keeps

growing, because the combination of engaged employees, cutting-edge products, and fun

brings people back. Even people trying to save a buck.

The cheap strategy doesn't scale very well, so the only way to succeed is to add value by

amplifying the network and giving workers a platform, not by forcing them to pretend to

be machines. The fickle nature of price-shopping consumers is bad news for many

companies, the companies that tried to be cheap at all costs, because now they must

figure out how to make a profit from expensive, unique, disobedient employees.

Those are the only two choices. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and

cheaper. Or win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human.

A Century of Interchangeable, Disposable Labor

Just over a century ago, leaders of our society started building a system that is now so

ingrained, most of us assume that it's always been here and always will be.

We continue to operate as if that system is still here, but every day we do that is a day

wasted, dollars lost, an opportunity squandered. And you need to see why.

The system we grew up with is based on a simple formula: Do your job. Show up. Work

hard. Listen to the boss. Stick it out. Be part of the system. You'll be rewarded.

That's the scam. Strong words, but true. You've been scammed. You traded years of your

life to be part of a giant con in which you are most definitely not the winner.

If you've been playing that game, it's no wonder you're frustrated. That game is over.

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.

(The Final Straw: The Law of the Mechanical Turk)1

Here's the law: Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can

be accomplished for awfully close to free.

Jimmy Wales led the tiny team at Wikipedia that destroyed the greatest reference book of

all time. And almost all of them worked for free.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica was started in 1770 and is maintained by a staff of more

than a hundred full-time editors. Over the last 250 years, it has probably cost more than a

hundred million dollars to build and edit.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is many times bigger, far more popular, and significantly

more up-to-date, and it was built for almost free. No single person could have done this.

No team of a thousand, in fact. But by breaking the development of articles into millions

of one-sentence or one-paragraph projects, Wikipedia took advantage of the law of the

Mechanical Turk. Instead of relying on a handful of well-paid people calling themselves

professionals, Wikipedia thrives by using the loosely coordinated work of millions of

knowledgeable people, each happy to contribute a tiny slice of the whole.

The original Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing "computer" built in the same year that

the Encyclopaedia Britannica was founded. Invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen, the

Turk wasn't actually a computer at all, but merely a box with a small person hidden

inside. A person pretending to be a computer.

Amazon.com took the idea of a man