Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody: Why Self-Managed Teams Make Better Decisions and Deliver Extraordinary Results

by Rod Collins

Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody questions the conventional thinking that prescribes how we organize work. For well over one hundred years, the centralized top-down hierarchy has served as the prototypical model for managing the work of large numbers of people Despite its longstanding presence in everyday social life, the centralized top-down hierarchy is an idea whose time has passed. The notion that the most effective way to organize the work of large numbers of people is to leverage the intelligence of an elite few by giving them command-and-control authority is no longer a sustainable proposition. That’s because, in our new Digital Age, the world is changing much faster than any single person or any elite group of like-minded individuals can absorb.

The book highlights the sudden unprecedented challenges of a radically different business world, describes why conventional management models are ill-equipped to meet these challenges, and acquaints readers with a new organizational paradigm—the self-managed peer-to-peer network—where leadership and decision-making are exercised by teams rather than individuals. The book spotlights three organizations that have decades of experience in using collective intelligence and shared power to assure their longevity as they navigate business environments continually transformed by increasing change and escalating complexity.

Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody is for leaders who are open to learning about the extraordinary advantages that self-managed networks provide through better and faster problem solving, more effective and efficient work processes, and consistent customer satisfaction and profitability. You will become proficient with practical steps you can take to build organizations that can change as fast as the world around you.

184 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 1, 2024

About the author

Rod Collins is the founder and owner of Wiki-Management, a Denver-based management consulting firm. Rod helps companies make the leap to extraordinary performance by showing them how they can gain quick access to the most untapped resource in almost every business: the collective knowledge of its own people. By learning how to leverage this rich resource, business leaders are able to transform slow-moving hierarchical bureaucracies into agile collaborative communities.

Collins is the former chief operating executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program, one of the nations largest and most successful business alliances, with over $19 billion in annual revenues. Under his leadership, the business increased its market share by 16 percentage points, and year after year, set new records for operational and financial performance.

Rod is the author of Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Knowledge to Make the Leap to Extraordinary Performance. He also writes a weekly blog on management innovation, which highlights how the most successful business leaders are reinventing management to stay ahead of todays ever-accelerating pace of change.
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