Quotes from The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki ·  306 pages

Rating: (20.3K votes)


“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds


“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, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds


“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, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds


“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, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds


“It may be, in the end, that a good society is defined more by how people treat strangers than by how they treat those they know.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds



“groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds


About the author

James Surowiecki
Born place: in Meriden, Connecticut, The United States
Born date April 30, 1967
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