The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki

Book Overview

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant--better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385721706
• ISBN13: 9780385721707
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Springboard for New Ideas

The Wisdom of Crowds is a profoundly tricky book to review. It is skillful written and enriched with excellent stories. The concepts, though, are provocative and sometimes carried to extremes. For those of you who read the book reviews in the business press, there is a lot more to this concept that the short snapshot in the papers. As Idea Management professionals, my firm, Imaginatik, works on a daily basis with mass participation systems, tapping into the potential 'wisdom' of large numbers of people. We try to avoid the `crowd' effect for idea generation because crowds tend towards group-think and mediocre, me-too ideas. In our view, companies need to collect a diverse selection of inputs to develop high quality concepts. The most intriguing aspect of the book is the potential to use internal 'crowds' to evaluate ideas and breakthrough concepts. Currently companies rely on small groups of senior managers to make serious and lasting judgments on concepts. Sadly, the track record of this approach is really not that good. In spite of years of `stage-gate' effort, the failure rate of new products still averages out at over 60%. There must be a better way of doing this, and this book gave me the inspiration to look at the problem in new ways. This, for me, is the best thing one can say about a book - it creates a springboard for new ideas. This is definitely one of these books and I strongly recommend you buy it, take a long Friday afternoon break in the loudest Starbucks in the neighborhood (no cell phones!), and start reading and thinking. And don't forget a pen and paper for your new thoughts.

Interesting & stimulating

I expected to hate this book but it confounded my expectations. It is a very interesting, provocative and stimulating. Even in the sections that I disagreed with there was enough interesting material to hold my attention, it was refreshing to need to question one's assumptions and to think about the points being made. What is the Wisdom of Crowds? The book defines it rather loosely suggesting that groups make better decisions if certain conditions are met. The conditions are: diversity (to ensure that different information is used to make the decision), independence and (a certain type of) decentralisation (to ensure that no one person is dictating the decision and that people are using their own private information) together with a way of summarising the different opinions into a collective view. This loose definition allows the book to address a huge range of topics. It does not build a coherent case attempting to support and justify the central thesis. Instead it relies on a more anecdotal approach - examining situations where crowds can be wiser and situations where they fail to be wise - it is a biography of an idea rather than a manifesto. To provide some structure three different types of problem are identified: cognition problems, co-ordination problems and co-operation problems. However, even within these broad areas large and rather diverse sets of problems are examined; to help in the analysis a wide range to techniques are utilised including psychology, statistics and game theory. The book makes great play of the ideas being counterintuitive and surprising; in some of the examples this is true, in others it seems to be seriously stretching the point. For example, the story about finding the lost submarine is surprising, as is the speed with which the market identified the company at fault for the Space Shuttle disaster. Less surprising are the examples which boil down to applied game theory, statistics or the fundamental nature of markets. The most important (practical) problem with the thesis is that the conditions required for the wisdom of crowds to apply are very difficult to meet. The book recognises this and devotes considerable space to situations where crowds fail to be wise because of this. For me, these are probably the best sections of the book. It is very clear that the wisdom of crowds does not mean management by committee (as committees almost always fail to meet the necessary conditions). It is also very sharp on the culture of the 'expert' and is very clear about the need for dissent and the importance of (intellectual) diversity. The section on NASA is chilling and excellent. In spite of the issues this is still a fascinating book. There is a huge range of stories and examples about how the wisdom of crowds can work and how it can fail spectacularly. I found it a thoroughly engaging and interesting book.

Essential reading

This is one of the most entertaining and intellectually engaging books I've come across in a long while. Surowiecki has a gift for making complex ideas accessible, and he has a wonderful eye for the telling anecdote. His thesis about the intelligence of groups made up of diverse, independent decision-makers seems initially counterintuitive, but by the end of the book it seems almost obvious, because of all the evidence Surowiecki piles up on its behalf.The book does cover a lot of ground in not very much space, and the pace of the argument is at times too fast. But the throughline of the argument is almost always clear, and the stories Surowiecki tells are often memorable. The chapter on NASA's mismanagement of the Columbia mission and the tale of how a man named John Craven relied on collective wisdom to find a lost submarine are especially striking.This is one of those books that I expect people will still be talking about and referring to years or even decades from now. It's also a book that I hope will have a concrete impact on the way that people make decisions, since the implications of Surowiecki's argument are radical in the best way.

A Counter-Intuitive Notion

In 1906, Francis Galton, known for his work on statistics and heredity, came across a weight-judging contest at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. This encounter was to challenge the foundations of his life's study.An ox was on display and for six-pence fair-goers could buy a stamped and numbered ticket, fill in their names and their guesses of the animal's weight after it had been slaughtered and dressed. The best guess received a prize.Eight hundred people tried their luck. They were diverse. Many had no knowledge of livestock; others were butchers and farmers. In Galton's mind this was a perfect analogy for democracy. He wanted to prove the average voter was capable of very little. Yet to his surprise, when he averaged the guesses, the total came to 1197 pounds. After the ox had been slaughtered, it weighted 1198.James Surowiecki takes Galton's counterintuitive notion and explores its ramification for business, government, science and the economy. It is a book about the world as it is. At the same time, it is a book about the world as it might be. Most of us believe that valuable nuggets of knowledge are concentrated in few minds. We believe the solution to our complex problems lies in finding the right person. When all we have to do, Surowiecki demonstrates over and over, is ask the gathered crowd.The well-written book is divided into two parts. The first deals with theory; the second offers case studies. Believe it or not, I found it to be a page-turner. The author has that precious ability to render the complex in simple, understandable and interesting prose.I have long been an admirer of H. L. Mencken who once wrote, "No one is this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."By the time I finished this book, I believed Mencken was wrong.

Intriguing and useful

I decided to read this book after reading an essay that Surowiecki wrote in Wired, arguing that companies and organizations in general put too much trust in the people at the very top and don't rely enough on the collective intelligence of their employees. This is exactly how things are run at the agency where I work. Information doesn't flow the way it should, decisions are made by fiat, and people are more interested in protecting their little fiefdoms than in solving problems intelligently. I was intrigued by the article's argument, but I wanted more detail.After reading the whole book, I'm convinced that the way we do things makes our decisions worse, not better. THE WISDOM OF CROWDS mounts a great case for the virtues of letting more people have a say in decisions, and it does so in a remarkably entertaining way. I thought there was a nice balance between anecdote and analysis here, with the stories -- including a great one about finding a lost submarine, and a detailed analysis of the Columbia disaster -- really illuminating Surowiecki's arguments. Because Surowiecki is challenging the idea that only a few select people should have influence over important decisions, it may be hard for his ideas to have an impact in the corporate and government world. But I'm convinced that this should change for good the way organizations make decisions.