(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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This book will make you look at meetings, working groups, committees or member associations in a different way. Few marketing professionals will be able to put it down.
The central thesis is the refreshing and counterintuitive perspective that groups can be much smarter than their most intelligent individual members, provided 4 conditions are met in the group interaction. These are:
- diversity of membership,
- independence of members to form & express their opinions,
- decentralisation of decision making
- and aggregation of individual’s views.
The wisdom of crowds is based on a statistical truism - surveying a number of individuals about their voting behaviour is much less reliable than asking the same number about their expectations what the voting result will be.
The author goes on to describe a number of situations where the wisdom of crowds works well, for example in creating markets for catering to customer needs. Here the book becomes a tribute to the Adam Smith’s invisible hand. This supports for example the current tendency in policy making to prefer market rather than command & control mechanisms. Further examples cover the world of science, stock markets, juries and democracy.
It makes a convincing case to avoid placing too much confidence in experts, whose expertise is often ’spectacularly narrow’ compared to the collective knowledge of the group.
[…] to a number of criteria. In the era of Web 2.0, the classical argument will be that the collective wisdom of crowds through bookmarking gives a good enough or even better quality measure of content quality. This […]