It doesn’t matter who the best people work for; if the project is interesting enough, the best people will find it.

Maryam Alavi, vice-dean of Emery University’s Goizueta Business School, argues that the only way firms can continue to have lower transaction costs than the open market is if they become more complex internally in order to respond to the increasingly complex external market. 

In the Aspen Institute’s “The Future of Work,” she explained that this was due to the “law of requisite variety” in systems theory, and she argued that a system must be as complex as the environment it is working within: 

“There are parts of the organization that are going to become more hierarchical because of the uncertainties that they deal with or don’t deal with. And there are parts of the organization that will need to be highly dynamic, open, and changing.”36 

Thus the new industrial organizational model. It’s built around “small pieces, loosely joined.” Companies are smaller, virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly, driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation. It doesn’t matter who the best people work for; if the project is interesting enough, the best people will find it.

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson