Ben Casnocha asks the question:Are You The Smartest Person in the Room? in a post that challenges conventional wisdom around intelligence and success:
After a certain baseline, raw intelligence just doesn’t impact success, in my opinion. The more successful person is the one who can facilitate the intelligence in the room (ever tried to get an all-star to work for an all-star? It’s tough). The more successful person can translate the intelligence.
What makes this chap’s comments interesting is that he is only 18 years old and is already a successful small businessman.
What can he teach us about practice development? Rather a lot I suggest. But then so can the open source community, where the democratization of input into solutions is leading to arguably better, more robust and useful applications.
Of course there will be contrarians who see the OSS approach as fraught with risk and danger, despite the collective higher wisdom and insight OSS development can bring. Anyone who believes the risk argument has clearly spent zero time hanging out in OSS communities to watch how issue get resolved and new ideas take shape. It is not through being combative but in the pursuit of a kind of morally superior technical excellence that is naturally collaborative in the best possible way.
I’d argue it is up to today’s business people to decide whether assembling applications that can readily talk with each other is preferable to having the perfect application which may never arrive? OK – it means putting up with ‘good enough’ software for the time being. But increasingly, the smart money is going exactly where Ben thinks:
Most amazingly successful people are called “brilliant” when in fact I think they’ve mastered the art of facilitating other people’s brains.
That’s OSS in action and at its best. It also sounds very much in line with my thoughts around the mutual value that can be achieved through professional co-opetition.
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