mate, the answer to this is simple..

> So what do you
> do with people that are smarter than yourself?

you hire them !

typically, "smart" folks don't have much of a clue about money, business or life so you just hire them. There are no or few examples of incredibly rich, empire builders who got that way by being "smart". As Henry Ford commented "PHD? Sure, I hire them all the time. What, do we need more?"

That Robert Kiyosaki guy has a good, excellent, explanation of all this (that changed my life in its clarity of explanation!) You may just think of those books as rah-rah get rich books, but one section (I think in the second book?) explains nicely the four types of people. One is the "perfectionist-professional expert" which I feel is what you are alluding to when you say "smart". They basically feel, often correctly, that they are the only person who can do something right and best.

In terms of Kiyosaki's topic, i.e. starting your own business and so on or getting in to business, he points out that the particular demon these blokes face in business is that they try to do everything themselves, can't delegate, etc etc.. It's an excellent exposition of the idea!

LoL! Yes, that's what google is doing...

But there is a thing about having too many. In general, a smart person has lots of smart ideas, but too many to implement. So they are wasted. The thing is to build a team of do-ers around a few architects, and that's where the challenge lies: in software engineering there is a pervasive belief that everyone is architect material, so how do take people who want to be smart and get them to do?

This is why companies with lots more money like banks employ a lot of contractors. Contractors are those who are smart enough to be smart, but instead take the money to do. So they have found a way to allow others to be smart, without themselves 'losing face' to use the Japanese term.

I will look out for Kiyosaki; there is always more to learn about building startups. I suggest you look around for Belbin; this is the most influentual model that I have come across for team building.

Belbin's model has 8 roles in it, and suggests that for success each team has to have representatives of each of the role; the experimental data has it that the ideal team size is 4, where each member nicely adopts two roles. Most people have a major role and a minor role, and the truly good people have an ability to suppress their natural roles and fill in the missing roles.

Unfortunately, the inventor seems to sell the model as a product so it isn't easily found on the net.

Maybe Kiyosaki is not all that he is cut out to be, think he is more of a new age guru than an investment specialist.

http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

(If this comment appears!) .. I think Kiyosaki is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand, sorry, I just mentioned him in passing.

There is a whole INDUSTRY of "Kiyosaki criticizers". You can find any number of web pages, such as the "John Reed" guy mentioned below. Most of them are authors who sell Invest In Real Estate, or similar, books, but only sell tiny numbers of books, who are horribly angry that Kiyosaki sells 100s of times more books. So (amazingly) they have nothing better to do than spend days asembling minutely detailed "I Hate Kiyosaki" pages on the internet. Perhaps this will boost the sales of their own How To Invest books.

The specific thing I mentioned in Kiyosaki was his description in book #2 which exactly meshes with the sense Iang meant about "smart" people. Anyways.

Iags original blog entry was awesome and Iang's blog is awesome. And I just learned about RSS, which will fail within a year or two like all these other pseudo-web standards attemts. Boring web and email will continue it's crappy plodding dominating course! :) JP

> and also singularly unproductive for their salaries, which was
> confusing. So what do you do with people that are smarter than
> yourself? That latter challenge has bugged me all my working life.

Ian,

So, they are kept on the payroll just in case they are needed for something nobody else can figure out?

Bob

In the light of one of our previous exchanges:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5495472.html?tag=zdnn.alert ;-)

Military vs Business world (dis)similarities?

gr

Twan