James Surowiecki Quotes

150 quotes in 2523 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that…
• Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence,…
• If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then…
• Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
• 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…
• But, if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that self-regulation doesn’t work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterrent to…
• Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
• 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…
• 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…
• One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
• In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.
• The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
• Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.
• Companies, like people, don't much like to change.

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