James Surowiecki > Quotes

“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

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

“The basic idea here is that for most people will power is a limited resource: if we spend lots of energy controlling our impulses in one area, it becomes harder to control our impulses in others. Or, as the psychologist Roy Baumeister puts it, will power is like a muscle: overuse temporarily exhausts it.”
― James Surowiecki

“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, 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, The Wisdom of Crowds

“Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgment won’t wreck the group’s collective judgment as long as those errors aren’t systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information.”
― James Surowiecki

“Collective decisions are only wise, remember, when they incorporate lots of different information.”
― James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

“Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives. Or, as March has famously argued, they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring.”
― James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

“Collective decisions are most likely to be good ones when they're made by people with diverse opinions reaching independent conclusions, relying primarily on their private information.”
― James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

“What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly. Or, rather, what makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest.”
― James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds