James Surowiecki Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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 uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.

James Surowiecki
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 are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.

James Surowiecki
One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.

James Surowiecki
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.

James Surowiecki
The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

James Surowiecki
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
The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.

James Surowiecki
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