September 2004

Some highlights from my weblog since mid-August...

The wisdom of crowds

James Surowiecki's new book, The Wisdom of Crowds, is a fascinating study of how crowds can often be smarter than experts, and the circumstances that affect their wisdom. It certainly emphasised to me the need for decision-making groups to embrace diverse perspectives. Here's a very brief snippet

Suggesting that the organisation with the smartest people may not be the best organisation is heretical, paticularly in a business world caught up in a ceaseless "war for talent" and governed by the assumption that a few superstars can make the difference between an excellent and a mediocre company. Heretical or not, it's the truth: the value of expertise is, in many contexts, overrated.

This is partly because expertise can be narrow; crowds can aggregate a lot more varied information.

There's more on the trouble with experts: evidence that they are are little better at forecasting than laypeople (psychologists are worse at predicting behaviour than non-psychologists); and "studies that have found experts' judgements to be neither consistent with the judgements of other experts in the field nor internally consistent

A litte more of my thoughts here and here. A good review of the book by Dave Pollard. I also have a post on avoiding Groupthink.

Next up on my reading list is Ben Zander's The Art of Possibility. My desire to read it was piqued by this extract about thinking as WE:

It points to relationship rather than to individuals, to communication patterns, gestures, and the in-between. Like the particle-and-wave nature of light, the WE is both a living entity and a long line of development unfolding...

Usually what we mean by the pronoun "we" is "you-plus-I," so the questions "What shall we do?" or "What will work for us?" generally refer to a compromise between what you want and what I want...

The practice of the WE offers an approach to conflict based on a different premise. It assumes there are no fixed wants nor static desires, while everything each of us thinks and feels has a place in the dialogue...

Traditional methods of resolving conflict, all the I/You approaches, tend to increase the level of discord because they attempt to satisfy the positions people take, rather than providing the means for people to broaden their desires. I/You methods deprive people of the opportunity to wish inclusively.

(I know a very funny story about the misuse of the Power of We - too rude to write here but ring me and I'll tell you! And no, it's not what you're thinking.)

Gifts and reputation building

A great story from (another) John Moore from his Starbucks days

In 1998, Mark McGwire, former St. Louis Cardinals home run hitting first baseman, walked into a Starbucks and gave the barista at the register a “gift” by commenting on how cool his Starbucks logo cap was. The barista took the “gift” and responded by giving the cap to McGwire.

A few nights later on the broadcast of the World Series, an NBC television camera spotted Mark McGwire in the stands proudly sporting the Starbucks logo cap the barista had given him. The television camera fixated on McGwire for over a minute as the announcers cooed about McGwire’s home run heroics of that year.

Needless to say, the marketing and PR departments at Starbucks were overjoyed at the visibility the company received during the World Series without having to fork over advertising dollars.

This was shown as an example of an Improv approach to work, in which life is seen as a series of offers which are accepted or blocked. More detail here and here.

Map reading

Another story I liked was this poem by Miroslav Holub

The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees

You can find some reflections on its meaning here.

Other good recent stories

A great essay in praise of small talk by David Weinberger

How the Russian's rough-and-ready approach to rocket engineering surpassed American precision

Wharton report: Corporate Governance by the Numbers: It Doesn't Work (My comments here)

Would you try staying in a Yotel!?

Thanks for reading.