James Surowiecki zeigt mit seinem New York Time Business Bestseller, welche Macht in der Weisheit der Massen steckt, wenn man in der Lage ist diese zu nutzen.

The fundamental truth about expertise is that it is spectacularly narrow. More important, there is no real evidence that one can become expert in something as board as “decision making” or “policy” or “strategy”. And as much of what we’ve seen so far suggests, that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than ever the most killed “decision maker”.

You can be biased and irrational, but as long you’re independent, you won’t make the group any dumber.

If you want to improve an organization’s or an economy’s decision making , one of the best things you can do in make sure, as much as possible, that decisions are made simultaneously (or close to it) rather than one after the other. One key to successful group decision is getting people to pay muss less attention to what everyone else is saying. The group’s collective judgement became, not surprisingly, significantly more accurate than the judgements of the cascading (Almerood: e.g. top-down) groups.

Decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system.

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each members of the group holds privately. The combination is what keeps the group wise.

The decisions that democracies make may not demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd. The decision to make them democratically does.

Mein Lieblingssatz: “Showing the flaws in other people’s work is one way to make a name for yourself” – wer hat sowas noch nicht erlebt?