Quotes by James Surowiecki - Page 4

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Independent
Long
People
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The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Opportunity
Acquire
Apples
Blockbuster
Dollars
Fifty
Google
Labels
Mere
Million Dollars
Apple
Excite
Missed
Refused
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Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Answers
Crowds
Effort
Example
Linux
People
Complex
Decentralized
Directing
Efforts
Good Example
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What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value - not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages - by enhancing productivity.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Jobs
Cost
Flow
Goods
Investment
Productivity
Rising
Wages
Capital
Enhancing
Per
Price
Stock
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Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Articles
College
College Students
Fashion
Finishing
Majority
Periods
Procrastination
Surveys
Academics
Author
Vast
Prone
Long Periods
Piece
Procrastinate
Putting
Suggest
Vast Majority
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Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that's left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Government
Benefits
Dedicated
Government Programs
Payroll
Payroll Tax
Political
Revenue
Social Security
Tax
Current
Designed
Funds
Unlike
Programs
Specifically
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On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Crucial
Driving
Harder
Moving
New Ideas
Organization
Play
Simplest
Writing
Chat
Hallway
Informal
Interactions
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No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Decision
Giving
Mind
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Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Wise
Balance
Independent
Smart
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What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Barriers
Commodity
Competition
Conversion
Corporations
Entry
Margins
Mean
Phenomenon
Profit
Profit Margin
Term
Characterized
Declining
Increasing
Lowered
Prices
Product
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If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Allocation
Bribery
Business World
Criteria
Decision
Efficient
Including
Mean
People
Resources
Business World Me
Encourages
Paying
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Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Chic
Country
Developing
Developing Countries
Economic
Fighting
Glamorous
Innovation
Poor
Poverty
Together
Two
Around
Countries
Downright
Entrepreneurs
Small
Involves
Least
Loans
Making
Normally
Popular
Pursuits
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Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Dream
Procrastination
Self
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Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Science
People
Small Numbers
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Markets work best when there's lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they're bad at predicting things like who will be the next Supreme Court nominee, as that depends on the whim of the president.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Available
Court
Depends
Election
Historical
Horse
Outcomes
Predicting
Race
Supreme
Supreme Court
Track
Track Record
Whim
Best Work Will
Nominee
Excel
Races
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In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Competitors
Cutting
Dvds
Gasoline
Increase
Player
Selling
Share
Works
Cut
Distinguish
Easiest
Easiest Way
Follow
Industries
Market
Market Share
Price
Product
Profits
Suit
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If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule:Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Army
Circles
Simple
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Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Car
Space
Technology
Allowing
Book
Cameras
Digital
Easier
Features
Harder
Leaving
Mysterious
Our Lives
Seems
Space Shuttle
Worthy
Things
More
Us
Make
Too
Controls
Often
Our
Efficiently
Hundreds
Lives
Quickly
Remote
Shuttle
Supposed
Systems
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Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Cities
Construction
Construction Workers
Destroyed
Devastated
Insurance Companies
Matter
Months
Regions
Reinventing
Taxpayers
Workers
Companies
Disasters
Happen
Insurance
Quickly
Redistribution
Smoothly
Themselves
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Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Running
Corporations
Dilemma
Managers
Owners
Pockets
Real
Self
Stakes
Occurs
Perennial
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The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Accounts
Avoiding
Essence
Habit
Lying
Procrastination
Tasks
Thinking
Great People Happy
Indulging
Involve
Lies
Mental
Perplexing
Psychic
Surely
Toll
Unpleasant
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Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Competition
Drug
Innovation
Invention
People
Protection
Stolen
Rules
People New Way
Clearly
Invest
Copied
Economists
Few People
Immediately
Incremental
Innovations
Limit
Necessary
Spur
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Companies have long gathered data to break down their customer base into specific segments. Now political parties have become adept at micro-targeting, too, using data on shopping habits, leisure activities, voting histories, charity donations, and so on, in order to pinpoint likely supporters and the type of appeal most likely to win them over.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Leisure Activities
Party
Winning
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When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list - somewhere between politicians and car salesmen. Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who prey on insecurity and ignorance to sell people what they don't need at prices they shouldn't have to pay.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Clever
Honesty
Ignorance
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There are lots of people who believe there may be at least some genetic component to procrastination, and even if there isn't, it seems to be the case that procrastination habits are often set relatively early in life (that's certainly the case with me). But I also think that there's lots of evidence that external tools can help quite a bit in getting people to stop procrastinating.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Believe
Procrastination
Thinking
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The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Wisdom
Mean
Smart
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Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromising. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead…the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Intelligent
Smart
Thinking
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Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the face of that future are much less likely to do so. And much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker."
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Hard Work
Intelligent
Skills
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This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.
James Surowiecki / Journalist
Intelligence
Jobs
Wisdom
Past
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